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Dessert

Coffee Cake

A brioche-style cake made with yeast, butter, eggs, and sugar, topped with an egg glaze and sprinkled with sugar and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Mary Ronald · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Coffee Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge dough

  1. Take two cupfuls of bread sponge, add one well-beaten egg, half a cupful of sugar, a tablespoonful of butter, and a cupful of tepid water. Mix well.

  2. Add enough flour to make a thin dough. Let rise until doubled.

  3. Turn dough onto a board, roll to one-inch thickness. Cut to fit a baking tin and let rise again until light.

  4. Just before baking, spread an egg beaten with a teaspoonful of sugar over the top. Sprinkle with granulated sugar and a few split blanched almonds.

  5. Bake in the oven until done.

  6. (Optional) Twist dough into rings instead of sheets.

Make the yeast dough

  1. Dissolve one cake of compressed yeast in a quarter cupful of lukewarm water. Stir until thoroughly mixed, then add enough flour to make a very soft ball of paste.

  2. Drop the ball into a pan of warm water (not hot). Cover and set in a warm place to rise for about an hour.

  3. Put the rest of the flour on a platter, make a well in the center. Into the well add butter, salt, sugar, and four eggs. Break eggs whole and have butter soft. Work together with hand, gradually incorporating flour, adding two more eggs one at a time. Beat until the dough loses stickiness.

  4. When the leaven is sufficiently light, lift it out of the water with a skimmer and place it with the dough. Add the last egg and beat for a long time by hand.

  5. Put the paste in a bowl, cover, and let rise to double its size (4–5 hours). Beat it down again and place on ice for 12–24 hours.

  6. After taking the paste from the ice, handle delicately and quickly; it softens as it warms.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

839Calories
21 gProtein
27 gFat
125 gCarbs

Counts 6 of 8 ingredients. The other 2 aren't in our nutrition table and add nothing above, so the real totals are higher.

What these numbers assume: 6 portions
IngredientPortion assumedkcal
Flour1 cup (125g) all-purpose455
Chocolate1 oz (28g) semisweet155
Butter1 tbsp (14g)102
Egg1 large egg (50g)78
Sugar1 tbsp (12.5g) granulated49
Salt1 tsp (6g)0
Waternot in our table0
Cakenot in our table0

One typical portion per ingredient; the recipe's quantities are not counted. A rough guide only, not for medical or dietary planning.

By Mary Ronald. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread sponge
A pre-fermented starter that gives the dough its early rise and developed flavor.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and body.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Eggs
Add richness and structure, and help bind the dough as they set in baking.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and contributes richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast, and helps the top brown.

The step that matters

Handling the chilled dough. Cold dough is firm but becomes soft and sticky as it warms, so it must be shaped quickly and gently. Working it slowly lets the butter soften and the gluten tighten unevenly, which makes the dough hard to handle and can make the finished cake dense.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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