Coffee Cake with Fudge Glaze

I love recipe books that are a little bit different from the norm - they are the kind of book you can curl up with at night to read, even if you never get around to making anything out of them.

Recently, I read on Anne's Food about In Grandma's Arbor: Five Generations of Breads, Pastries and Cakes. It contains the recipes of one Swedish family, passed down through the generations in waxed oilcloth books, with the oldest recipes dating back to 1852! When I read this, I knew I had to have this book. The fact that it contains Swedish recipes in itself is interesting, but combine that with the historical family twist, I was hooked. I was impressed that it arrived in the mail all the way from Sweden in under a week - Amazon takes much longer.

It is only a small book size-wise, but it is packed with 153 pages of photographs and recipes. Each recipe is accompanied by a gorgeous photograph, so you get a feel for what you are making, even if you are unfamiliar with Swedish baked goods (like me!). Some of the recipes are universal, like sponge cake and jam roll, but others are uniquely Swedish, like raspberry caves and Kinuski cake.

I chose to make a coffee cake with fudge glazing, which is one of the older recipes in the book. I used a 10 inch springform pan as specified in the recipe, but my cake turned out somewhat flat. Next time, I would use a smaller tin (or perhaps use more baking powder - see below). Despite its comparative flatness, the cake tasted pleasant, being a coffee sponge. However, the super, memorable part about this cake that I would make again was the fudge glazing. It tastes superb! The glaze is very runny, and is quite sticky, but it tastes devine. I think it would be wonderful as a dessert sauce on just about anything. I decorated the cake with hazelnut praline buttercream left over from the Daring Bakers Filbert Gateau challenge, and topped the buttercream swirls with silver cachous.

To make your very own coffee cake with fudge glaze, you will need:

Cake

100g butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tablespoons instant coffee granules
1/2 teaspoon water
1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder (I wonder if this is why it was so flat?)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder

Glaze

100g butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup pouring cream
1/4 cup golden syrup
1 tabelspoon cocoa powder
1/2 tablespoon instant coffee granules

For the cake:

Preheat your oven to 175 degrees celsius, and grease and line a 25cm (~10 inch) springform pan (although I recommend trying a smaller one for a taller cake).

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and set aside. Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a small bowl until light and fluffy. In a cup, mix the coffee granules and water together to form a paste, then add this paste and the melted butter to the egg mixture and combine well. Sift the flour and baking powder together in a bowl, then pour into the wet ingredients and fold through until just combined. Pour the batter into the prepared springorm pan, and bake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes or until cooked through. Remove the cake from the oven and prepare the glaze immediately.

For the glaze:

Place the butter, sugar, cream, golden syrup, cocoa and coffee granules in a small saucepan and combine well. Bring to the boil on the stovetop over medium heat, and boil for 2 minutes, stirring until the mixture has thickened. Turn the cake out of the tin about 5 minutes after taking it out of the oven, and pour the glaze over the hot cake. Voila!

Finally, I couldn't resist sharing a photograph of the lovely tea towel that my friend Karen brought back for me from Harrods in London:

It's pink, it's girly, it has pictures of cakes - what more could a girl want??? Thanks Karen!