Sunday Brunch: Coffee Cake

My friend Elle and I are big fans of breakfast food. For the duration of our friendship we've been meeting up regularly for breakfast and brunch. It's even become a bit of a tradition at this point! The trouble is, we both have some dietary restrictions, so we have to choose our breakfast recipes and restaurants carefully to make sure that we'll both be happy. So when we cook together, it has to be gluten free, dairy free, and vegetarian.

So today, we decided to make coffee cake! Look how good it looks!

 

Elle heartily approves this coffee cake!

Since it was such a beautiful morning, we decided to eat outdoors. It ended up being a wonderful morning of baking, chatting, soaking up the sun, and, of course, eating this super tasty coffee cake!

Wanna make it yourself? You should! It was super delicious! Here's how:

Ingredients

Now just as a note, in the past when I was able to bake with wheat flour I would have never dreamed of using a cake mix, but if you've done any amount of gluten free baking, you know that baking from scratch can be a bit of a gamble and it can cost a fair amount of money to gather up all the different flours. That's why when I find something that works well, it becomes a staple in my pantry. My recent revelation has been Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Vanilla Cake Mix. Guys, it's cheap, consistent, delicious, and easily customized. Bonus points: my friends who eat gluten think it's great, too!

Ingredients:

For the cake:

- 1 package Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Vanilla Cake Mix

- 3 large eggs at room temperature

- 1/2 cup vegetable oil

- 1/2 cup water at room temperature

- 6oz blueberries (optional, but HIGHLY recommended)

For the topping:

- 10 tbs brown sugar

- 4 tbs gluten free flour (use whatever you have on hand)

- 4 tbs Earth Balance (or butter. You do you!)

- 1 tsp cinammon

- Pinch of salt

1. Preheat your over to 325°F and grease a 9x13" non-stick pan.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs for 30 seconds on medium-low speed.
3. Add the mix, then the oil, then the water and beat on medium-low speed for 60 seconds. Be sure to scrape the bowl with a spatula at least once during the mixing process. If you wanted to add a bit of vanilla extract this would be when to do so.
4. If you are using blueberries (do it, seriously), now is the time to add them! Use your spatula to fold them into the cake batter.
5. Pour the batter into the pan and smooth with a spatula. We made our coffee cake half with blueberries and half without to see which we liked better, so we added them in at this point and mixed them in right in the pan!
6. In a small bowl, measure out the topping ingredients and combine until crumbly. I like to use a fork for this.
7. Sprinkle topping over cake batter and put in the oven to bake for 30-35 minutes. It will be done when the cake is slightly golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
8. Cool until it's not so hot that it will burn your mouth and devour! I heartily recommend serving it with some fresh berries.

I hope you enjoy it!

Til next time!

-Becca