Coffee Pecan Cake

Apologies for the lack of new recipes, the past couple of weeks have been pretty annoying largely to do with the fact that my car died on the way to get ingredients one day. Luckily it happened right outside my house so at least I wasn’t stranded anywhere! It did however mean that I was unable to make it to the supermarket and therefore no new recipes were created. Since then it’s all been about house hunting again for me. Today we went and looked around 7 houses, 5 of which were awful...barely suitable for human habitation in my opinion! We found a couple of possibilities though so that was something.

This week anyway I’m back to baking ways, bringing into your lives a coffee pecan cake. I know it’s traditionally walnuts that get involved with coffee cake but I had a bag of pecans in the cupboard and decided they could be experimented with. It all worked out deliciously!

I’ve also made a bit of a weird topping for me. Although a lot of coffee cake recipes use a butter cream, I wanted something a bit smoother and firmer like those little coffee biscuits that I can’t remember the name of now. Helpful!

Anyway, a new cake from me for you to treat yourselves with this Friday. It went down very well at work in that it disappeared with about 5 minutes, no exaggeration, so I hope you enjoy it too!

Some final tips before you get started:

• To crush my pecans I put them into a small sandwich bag and smashed them with a rolling pin – much more therapeutic than putting them in a blender!
• This frosting, as I’ve already said, is not like the usual buttercreams I make. The inclusion of syrup helps it to set a lot faster than usual and therefore I don’t suggest you beat this for very long at all. It literally just needs beating until smooth and well combined and then immediately spread onto your cake.
• If your frosting does get a little stiff before you can spread it, simply run your spreading or palette knife under hot water before spreading and it should go on easily.

Coffee Pecan Cake

225g Unsalted Butter (softened)

225g Caster Sugar

2tsp. Instant Coffee in 1tbsp. Boiling Water (cooled)

225g Plain Flour

2 ½ tsp. Baking Powder

½ tsp. Bicarbonate of Soda

4 Eggs

1 tbsp. Milk

50g Pecans (crushed)

Frosting

50g Unsalted Butter

1tbsp. Golden Syrup

300g Icing Sugar

2tbsp. Strong Coffee

Pecans (to decorate)

1)      Preheat the oven to 180◦C, grease and line two 20cm cake tins. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in the coffee until smooth.

2)      In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and add the crushed pecans. In a further bowl, lightly whisk your eggs together with the milk. Add a small amount of the eggs to the creamed butter and sugar and mix well. Add a little of the flour mixture and again stir to combine. Continue doing this, alternating between the two until all ingredients are incorporated. 

3)      Divide the mixture evenly between the two tins and bake in the preheated oven for 25-30mins or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cakes comes out clean. Once cooked, leave to cool completely.

4)      To make the frosting, in a small saucepan melt together the butter and golden syrup over a low heat. Sift the icing sugar into a large mixing bowl before adding the melted butter and syrup as well as the coffee. Mix until smooth and well combined.

5)      Spread half of the frosting on top of one cake before sandwiching together with the other cake. Spread the remaining frosting evenly over the top. Finally, decorate with the pecan halves.