David

David

Spongy Cinnamon Cake With Cacao-Coffee Glaze

This cinnamon cake is a guaranteed crowd pleaser and it’s so simple to make. This recipe has quite a bit of cinnamon, as it should in my opinion, but you can scale down a few grams if prefer a milder flavor. One thing that is not optional is the buttermilk. Do. not. use. regular milk, or the result just won’t be the same.

Butter milk alternatives (if you can’t get it):

  • Use milk with lemonjuice (the recipe already includes lemon juice, you just add more). Add 15 ml lemon juice per 250 ml milk.
  • Use an acidic yoghurt.

Prep time: 30 min Bake time: 30 min

12-16 pieces

Cinnamon Cake

Ingredients

Cinnamon cake

  • 3 eggs
  • 400 g white baking sugar
  • 15 g cinnamon powder
  • 4 g baking soda
  • 1 g fine salt
  • 400 g wheat flour
  • 350 ml buttermilk
  • 15 ml lemon juice
  • 125 g melted butter

Note: you can also use a darker sugar type, which gives a more caramel-like taste, but since I was aiming for a powerful cinnamon flavour and already use a flavor-bomb of a glaze, I decided to use white sugar, which still caramelizes (on the top) but there’s no risk of overpowering the cinnamon.

Glaze

  • 75 g soft butter
  • 300 g powdered sugar
  • 11 g cacao powder
  • 75 ml strong coffee

Note: if you don’t like coffee, just use plain water.

Approach

Cinnamon cake

Note: you might want to turn your oven on now, so it's ready for step 6.

  1. Whisk eggs and sugar until light and fluffy.

  2. Blend cinnamon, baking soda, salt, and flour in a separate bowl, and sift it into the egg & sugar that you just whisked. Stir it together well, but don’t be too rough, as you don’t want to punch out all the air of your dough. Think turn the dough together rather than stir.

  3. Add buttermilk & lemon juice to your dough and mix it together evenly.

  4. Add the melted butter and and blend it together until the entire dough looks uniform in texture (it should be thick, but not stiff, don’t over whisk it, we don’t want whipped cream).

  5. Take a 20x30 cm pan (a square, even angled shape works best) and cover it with baking paper and add the cake dough to it. It should be thick, but runny enough to easily slip from your bowl to your baking pan. If it’s too thick (you overwhisked it), you can save it by by stirring in a bit of milk until it becomes more liquidy again, and then pour it into your baking pan.

  6. Bake it at 190 degrees celsius (374 fahrenheit) for 25 to 35 min. Prick it with a fork to check if it’s done. The taller your cake, the longer the baking time.

  7. Important: the cake surface should be light or dark brown (depending on the sugar type) (not burned) but if for some reason it isn’t at around the 20 min mark, turn up the heat around 20% for the last 5 minutes (keep an eye on it and be ready to turn it down, ovens are different). Color = taste.

  8. When done baking, take it out and let it cool for at least 10 min before you add the glaze which we’ll make while it cools down.

Coffee-Cacao Glaze

  1. Add butter, powdered sugar, cacao, and coffee (best if filtered, to avoid making the texture grainy) to a small pan on low heat. If the butter is really soft, you can do this step without heat, just use a bowl then.
  2. Whisk everything together until you have a thick, consistent glaze
  3. Spread the glaze evenly on the cooled down cake (if it’s too warm, your glaze might get runny, separate, and other annoying things).
  4. Eat!

Notes

This cake can be served immediately (semi-warm) but it tastes even better the day after. Due to the high sugar content you can store it for at least 3 days in an airtight container without it going bad.

If you transfer the cake to your fridge for storing, make sure it’s well concealed, or your spongy cake might soak up unwanted taste from the other food items in your fridge.

You can also freeze the cake. It will store fine for at least a month. Follow the same concealing protocol as above so you don’t ruin it.

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