Coffee Cake – Take One

I don’t know about you, but I love coffee cake. If you will recall, I like it so much, that I have even tried to make it in the microwave, with disastrous results. And so the search has continued for a recipe. Recently I found one for something called Cinnamon Roll Cake on the boards, which looked delicious and seemed easy enough, so I decided to give it a try. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

INGREDIENTS:

Cake:
3 c. flour
1/4 tsp.salt
1 c. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 c. milk
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 c. butter, melted

Topping:
1 c. butter, softened
1 c. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. cinnamon

Mix everything together except for the butter. Slowly stir in the melted butter and pour into a greased 9×13 pan. For the topping, mix all the ingredients together until well combined. Drop evenly over the batter and swirl with a knife. Bake at 350 for 28-32 minutes.

Glaze:
2 c. powdered sugar
5 Tbsp. milk
1 tsp. vanilla

While warm drizzle the glaze over the cake.

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So then it was Business Time.

All the ingredients for the cake went into the mixer together.

Once they were combined, I poured the melted butter in slowly and stirred it in by hand.

The batter went into a 9×13 pan.

And then I made the topping, using a fork to mix it all together.

The topping was then dropped in small clumps over the batter in the pan,

and then I used a fork to swirl it around a bit.

It went into a 350 degree oven. The recipe says to bake it for 28-32 minutes. After 28 minutes, the batter was still raw, so I added five minutes, and then another five, but even then, the cake jiggled when I moved it. In fact, when I tilted the pan, it slid a little because it was wet on the bottom. I put it in for another five minutes, and because I was worried about the edges, which were beginning to brown, I turned the oven down to 325. And then, because as a baker, I live in fear of dry cake, I took it out of the oven.

Most of the toothpicks I put in seemed to come out clean, but it was hard to tell with the cinnamon swirl parts in there. The edges were really starting to brown, and I figured it would probably bake a bit more while it cooled.

After it cooled, which took more than an hour, I made the icing. This I did by hand, since it’s a poured icing and didn’t need to have any kind of thickness to it.

Then I drizzled it over the cake and used an icing spreader to distribute it evenly.

It was good, at least around the edges, but the further I got toward the middle, the less baked the cake was.

Overall, the batter was better than the cake itself. I don’t think it needs the butter poured in because that kind of puts it over the top. I mean, between the cake and the topping, you’ve got three sticks of butter in there. I think just the two in the topping would do. Also, I think there was a little too much icing. Just enough to drizzle would have been enough. But having it cover the entire top of the cake makes the sweetness of the icing kind of overpower the cinnamon flavor of the cake.

Bottom line, if I made it again, I would only use the butter in the topping. Plus, I would bake it at 325 degrees for 40-45 minutes (thinking that without that melted butter it might bake more quickly and evenly) and use about half the icing.