Looking for the rest of the Superabundant newsletter?
Subscribe now to get original recipes, PNW food news, and ideas for the kitchen and garden!
Baked until the fruit is thick and jammy (not unlike hot asphalt), this coffee cake is really more like a reverse cobbler — here, the fruit is on top of the cake (which barely stitches it all together), whereas a cobbler is more like a pan of hot jam topped with cake cobblestones. Yes, that is yet another roadbuilding reference, but don’t worry, this coffee cake is tender, sneaky-healthy and perfectly sweet, and contains absolutely no crushed basalt whatsoever. Best of all, it uses up a ton of pretty much any fruit.
Maybe your neighbor left a bag of ripe plums on your porch, not realizing you are already contending with the pounds you culled from your own tree (a different variety, at least) and are still giving out jars of last year’s plum sweet and sour sauce as fast as you can. Maybe you’ve gotten your hands on a bucket of blackberries, or have a bowl of the good parts you cut off the slightly wormy apples you gleaned. If you live in the Northwest, you probably know a guy who is desperate to offload their peak-season excess, and now you have the perfect blank canvas to soak it all up.
This coffee cake’s batter is thicker and stickier than my usual snack cakes’ recipes, with chia seeds and flax meal to help gelatinize the juices as they cook out of the fruit. These nutritious additions (plus the whole wheat flour and gobs of fruit) make this cake a proper salubrious start to the day, but it’s also wonderful with your afternoon beverage of choice. Makes one large rectangle of coffee cake
Note: I’m buried in blackberries and plums at the moment, but you should use whatever fruit you have — you’ll need about six cups total. I segregated my fruit into different sections of the cake so I could play with the flavors more: A few pinches of cardamom, sliced almonds and a drop or two of almond extract for the plums; a scrape or two of lemon zest, chopped hazelnuts and a couple cracks of black pepper for the blackberries.
Ingredients
3 cups of blackberries
18 prune plums, halved and pitted
1 ¼ cup sugar, divided
1 ¼ teaspoon cinnamon, divided
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon powdered ginger
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ cup chia seeds
2 tablespoons flax meal
½ cup milk
½ cup neutral oil
2 large eggs
¼ teaspoon almond extract
¼ to ½ cup chopped or sliced nuts for topping (optional)
Sparkling sugar for top (optional)
Instructions
- Place the blackberries and plums in separate bowls (or together!) and sprinkle each with 2 tablespoons of the sugar and a few pinches of cinnamon (feel free to riff here). Set aside to macerate while you prepare the cake batter.
- Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease and line with parchment a 9 x 13-inch rectangular baking dish.
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the remaining sugar and cinnamon with the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices, chia seeds and flax meal.
- Whisk together the milk, oil, eggs and almond extract (I do this in the same liquid measuring cup), then form a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the milk mixture. Stir until just combined. Don’t overmix!
- Scrape and spread the batter into the prepared baking dish, then use a slotted spoon to scoop out the fruit and strew it across the cake batter, gently pressing it in to anchor it. I arranged mine in a checker pattern just for kicks.
- If you’re using nuts, stir them into the leftover fruit syrup before adding them to the top of the fruit (if you’re not using nuts, dribble the syrup across the top instead), then sprinkle the top with sparkling sugar if you’re living deliciously.
- Bake until the fruit is soft and jammy and a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out dry, about 45-50 minutes. Allow the cake to cool for about 15 minutes before cutting, and store leftovers in the fridge.