Cranberry cardamom coffee cake is amazingly delicious; it’s the ideal breakfast for the holiday season.
One of life’s great tragedies, I think, is that cranberries are a mostly seasonal ingredient. If it were up to me I’d eat cranberry bread and muffins and, yes, Starbucks cranberry bliss bars year-round. You can get away with adding craisins to cookies well into the new year, but by January nobody wants fresh cranberries anymore.
(Side note: remember when you just COULD NOT escape the craisin craze? Circa 1994-ish. I actively hated dried cranberries back then, during the height of their overexposure, but now eat them by the handful on the reg. I’m actually a little angsty at the moment because I just finished a bag of craisins and don’t have another in the cupboard waiting.)
So I make up for the short life of the fresh cranberry by baking with them almost constantly from Thanksgiving till New Years. Today I incorporated my absolutely favorite spice, that’s right, cardamom into my recipe.
The result is this wondrous, glorious, sweet but tart, spicy but mellow coffee cake. And it’s an excellent way to use up any cranberries you have leftover from your holidays.
Can I please just tell you what happens to the crumb topping as the cake bakes? It melts, just a little, into the cake and creates these swirls of gooey, sugary goodness and that’s the very best part of this whole delicious coffee cake. The swirls.
But the rest isn’t half bad. A moist cake, just a little sweet, with the most cheerful and pretty little red cranberries. I’m in love. In love, I tell you. That isn’t hyperbole; it’s truth.
Eat this, please, for breakfast sometime this week. You’ll thank yourself. And you can make the crumb topping ahead, which gives you a little extra time to sleep in, if you’re a sleeper-inner. (BTW one of my new year’s resolutions is to develop a grown-up vocabulary.)
I hope your holidays were wonderful and that you have a lovely new year!
Ingredients
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1/3 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
- 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
- 6 cardamom pods, shelled and finely ground
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- 2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries, coarsely chopped
- 2 cups + 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 6 cardamom pods, shelled and finely ground
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar
- zest of half a lemon
- 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup buttermilk
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray an 8-inch square baking pan generously with cooking spray; set pan aside.
- Place all ingredients except walnuts in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until the mixture just forms large clumps and holds together when squeezed in the palm of your hand. Pour topping into a mixing bowl and stir in nuts. Press a piece of plastic wrap against the surface of the crumbs and refrigerate until needed, or up to 3 days.
- Toss the cranberries together with 2 teaspoons of flour in a small bowl. Set aside.
- Whisk together the remaining 2 cups of flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and cardamom.
- Place the sugar and lemon zest in the bowl of a stand mixer and rub the zest into the sugar with your fingertips until the sugar becomes moist and fragrant. Fit the mixer with the paddle attachment and add the butter. Beat on medium speed until light, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition. Beat in vanilla. Reduce speed to low and add the flour mixture in 3 parts, alternating with the buttermilk (begin and end with the dry ingredients). Batter will be thick. Gently fold in the berries with a spatula.
- Pour batter into the prepared baking pan and smooth the top with a spatula. Break crumb mixture into pieces and sprinkle over the cake. The pieces don’t need to be uniform in size—the cake with be cuter if they aren’t. Press the crumbs into the cake lightly with your palm.
- Bake for 55 to 65 minutes, until crumbs are golden and a cake tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Transfer cake to a wire rack and cool for 20 to 30 minutes before serving.
Adapted from Baking: From My Home to Yours
