“This is typical of the medium-sweet, yeasty coffee cakes that one finds in Pennsylvania and other parts of the country where Moravian groups have settled…I recommend it highly.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread
After days of sandwiches, we finally polished off the Italian Holiday Bread and Pullman Loaf, and it was time to make more bread last night. Since I’m trying to work my way through the rest of the sweet breads, and happened to have some instant mashed potatoes on hand, I settled on Moravian Coffee Cake. (Also, I should get bonus points for correctly identifying Moravia as part of what is now the Czech Republic. I do have moments when I feel like I could win some serious money on Cash Cab.)
Here are the ingredients:
I attempted to mix the ingredients using an electric mixer, as instructed by the recipe. However, my electric mixer is a little hand held model: great for mixing cake batter, but not very effective at mixing a thick bread dough. I resorted to my favorite wooden spoon (yes, I do actually have a favorite spoon) to mix in most of the flour, and incorporated the rest during kneading.
After a first rising of about 45 minutes, I rolled the dough into rectangles to fit my 9 x 5 pans. I sprinkled each loaf a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon and then drizzled with melted butter. The recipe calls for an entire stick of melted butter. Since there was already one stick of butter in the bread dough, and I am not as avid a member of the butter fan club as James Beard, I only used half a stick of melted butter. I think that a whole stick would have been overkill–most of the butter would have slid right off the dough anyway.
I let the loaves rise for another 45 minutes, and then popped them in the oven for 30 minutes at 350 degrees, after which the house smelled like a giant cinnamon roll.
In the interests of quality control, I sampled some Moravian Coffee Cake right out of the oven. It is a very unique bread texturally, with a spongy, moist center and a crisp, struesel-like top crust. The bread itself has just a hint of sweetness, with most of the flavor coming from the topping. Beard includes a recipe for an icing to drizzle over the cake, but the top is so sweet already that I think the icing would be too much.
Note: Mike thought that this recipe would be better if the bread was sweetened with honey. To me, the combination of honey, brown sugar, and cinnamon seems strange, but it might be an interesting experiment.
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