Coffee & Almond Cake

Good: a cake with coffee and a terrific crunchy streusel topping.

Souvenir baking

Just something nice for the weekend, this is my variant on a recipe found in yet another souvenir book: “Chocolate & Baking” (Super Cookery series), a tiny book with 512 pages and incredibly well filled with goodies.

recipe: Coffee & Almond Cake

This is for a 23 cm round (loose-bottomed) cake tin.
cake:

275 g self-raising flour
75 g caster sugar
150 ml milk
2 eggs
100 g butter
2 tbsp instant coffee with a bit of water
50 g chopped almonds

topping:

75 g self-raising flour
75 g brown sugar
25 g butter
optional 1 tsp allpice
1 tbsp water

..and some icing sugar for dusting.

Method

Prepare the cake tin with a bit of margarine and line it with baking parchment. Put sugar and flour in a bowl. Whisk the milk, eggs, butter and coffee mixture together and pour onto the dry ingredients. Stir in the chopped almonds. Spoon the mixture into the tin.
Now make the streusel topping. Mix flour and sugar, rub in the butter. Add the allspice and the tbsp of water, then use your fingers to make a loose crumbly mix. Sprinkle this over the cake mixture.

Bake in a pre-heated oven, 190°C, for about 50 to 60 minutes. Cover with alu foil for the last 10 to 15 minutes to prevent the topping getting too brown too soon. Leave to cool in the tin, then turn out and dust lightly with icing sugar.

Notes

Instead of chopping up whole almonds, I used flaked almonds for the cake mixture. As you put them in last, they don’t mix that well. Better to put the almonds in with the dry ingredients, and maybe better still: use chunky chopped almonds.