Peanut Butter-Nutella Coffee Cake

We had a crumb cake bake-off at work last week, with the three "contestants" being the NY-style crumb cake from Baked, this peanut butter-Nutella coffee cake, and the New "Deli" crumb cake from Zingerman's Bakehouse. The NY-style crumb cake is Caleb's current favorite, and it won the crumb cake bake-off by a giant margin, but people were pretty passionate about this PB-Nutella coffee cake too.

One of the things I appreciate about cookbooks is that the recipes should have gone through some vetting process. It's expensive to print a cookbook, especially one with page-length color photos to accompany each recipe. Given the "cost-per-recipe" in this kind of cookbook, odds are quite good the recipe has been tested by, not only the author, but also at least one if not multiple recipe testers. Thus, the probability of recipe failure is substantially lower than failure rates for online recipes, where recipes can be written up and published by anyone, and there's no guarantee the final recipe was ever tested, much less error-free and easy to follow. Bake from Scratch (volume 2) is not only a gorgeously produced cookbook, it's the compilation of every recipe published in 2017 under the Bake from Scratch magazine label, yet another business model that should produce well-tested recipes. So while I've raised my eyebrows several times at the quantities called for in some of the Bake from Scratch recipes (12 cups of flour to yield 3 giant Christmas cakes - why?!), I'm pretty confident in trying out their recipes because I expect them to turn out perfectly the first time.

After making the crumb toppings for the Baked and Zingerman's crumb cakes, I wasn't sure about the strategy behind how the peanut butter crumb topping is assembled here, but it actually turned out just fine, no butter melting required.

You do need to take your time when creaming together the sugar, butter, and peanut butter, because the peanut butter (I used Skippy) remains quite stubbornly unincorporated even after several minutes of creaming with my Pro series kitchenAid. So scrape down the mixing bowl several times during this process, paying particular attention to the bottom where the peanut butter likes to hide from your spatula. This whole process took about 4 minutes with my mixer.

Similarly, the eggs need to be added in one-at-a-time, and after they're both fully incorporated, the batter should be beaten for another 2-3 minutes, until the batter becomes quite light in hue and more voluminous. You'll add the sour cream and vanilla, then again, beat the batter for several minutes. This seemingly lengthy process for mixing is critical to achieving the airy, tender crumb of the baked coffee cake.

Usually I feel comfortable substituting yogurt for sour cream, but extensive coffee cake testing in my apartment has conclusively shown that coffee cake make with (0% Greek) yogurt dries out substantially faster than coffee cake made with full fat sour cream. It's true that I haven't tested the idea with whole fat Greek (or regular) plain yogurt, but I'd advocate for using sour cream here if you can.

Unlike the other two crumb cakes, this coffee cake includes not only sour cream, but also a milk component that you add in alternating stages with the dry ingredients. The instructions printed don't actually specify the number of times to alternate, but it seems like the baking "standard" is three cycles: flour-milk-flour-milk-flour, so that's what I went with here. Any milk is likely fine, although if you decide to use buttermilk you'll want to replace some of the baking powder with baking soda. Once that's done (all said, it took me about 30 minutes), it's time to fill the cake pan with the batter-Nutella-batter-crumb.

Weigh your cake pan, tare the scale, then add about 470 grams of peanut butter cake batter to the pan and even out the top. I warmed my "chocolate-hazelnut spread" (aka Nutella) up for about 25 seconds in the microwave in order to get it to a spreadable consistency, and found it quite easy to spread the Nutella over the bottom layer of batter without the Nutella "sticking" and pulling batter along with it. Similarly, my top layer of batter didn't seem to disturb the layer of Nutella I'd carefully constructed, which I confess to be happily surprised by, as I thought for sure it would. The peanut butter crumb topping is just scattered on top, and there's plenty here to cover the surface of the cake.

In baking the coffee cakes for the bake off, I made a somewhat strategic error when I decided to bake all three at once. They took much longer to bake because there were three giant coffee cakes in the oven than they would have done individually, which means I don't have an accurate time for when this peanut butter-Nutella coffee cake will be cooked through in your oven. I can however recommend a very careful test with your toothpick, and will even go so far as to advise the use of a thermometer to gauge doneness on this cake. My toothpick came out clean and so I pulled the cake out, but you can probably see from the pictures that it's slightly underbaked along the Nutella layer. This didn't seem to bother anyone, but it was less than ideal.

Still, this cake was delicious and of the three I made, it was definitely my favorite (I do love peanut butter and Nutella). It's super easy to make and unlike the other cakes you don't need to wait for the crumbs to dry out before baking. I'd definitely make this again for a brunch or just to have around the house as a special treat.

Peanut Butter-Nutella Coffee Cake

This coffee cake from Bake from Scratch volume 2 is the perfect variation on classic swirled coffee cake, marrying the salty crunch of peanuts (both in the crumb and the cake) with the rich satisfying sweetness of Nutella.

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Course: Breakfast, Brunch, Dessert

Cuisine: American

Prep Time: 45 minutes minutes

Cook Time: 50 minutes minutes

Resting time: 45 minutes minutes

Total Time: 1 hour hour 35 minutes minutes

Servings: 12 people

Ingredients

Peanut Butter Crumble (yields 1 cup)

• ⅓ cup (42 grams) all-purpose flour
• ¼ cup (55 grams) firmly packed light brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons (28 grams) unsalted butter softened
• 1 tablespoon (16 grams) creamy peanut butter
• ½ cup (57 grams) chopped roasted salted peanuts

Peanut Butter Coffee Cake

• ½ cup (113 grams) unsalted butter softened
• ½ cup (128 grams) creamy peanut butter
• 1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• ¼ cup (60 grams) sour cream*
• 1 ½ teaspoons (6 grams) vanilla extract
• 1 ½ cups (188 grams) all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon (5 grams) baking powder
• ½ teaspoon (1.5 grams) kosher salt
• ½ cup (120 grams) whole milk**
• ¾ cup (192 grams) chocolate-hazelnut spread, like Nutella warmed briefly (10-15 seconds) to a spreadable consistency

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C). Butter and flour (or spray with baking spray) a 9-inch round springform*** pan, then cover the bottom with a 9-inch circle of parchment paper.
  

Crumble

• Whisk together the flour and brown sugar in a medium bowl. Stir in the soft butter and peanut butter, until the mixture is crumbly. There will still be distinct small bits of butter and peanut butter. Stir in the chopped peanuts, then set aside.
  

Coffee Cake

• In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, add the butter, peanut butter, and sugar, then beat at medium speed until creamy and lightened in color, about 4 minutes. Stop every minute or so to scrape down the sides and bottom especially, as the peanut butter likes to stay separated.
• Add the eggs one at a time, beating well (about 30-60 seconds at least) on medium speed after each addition. Beat in the sour cream and the vanilla extract, and scrape down the sides of the bowl again.
  
• In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Measure out the whole milk and place it in a container with a spout (ideally) so it can be easily poured. You will add the flour and milk in three parts, starting with the flour.
  
• Running the mixer at the lowest speed, slowly add ⅓ of the flour mixture, beating until just barely incorporated, then pour in ½ the milk, beating until just barely incorporated. Repeat this process for the second ⅓ of the flour, the other ½ of the milk, then the final ⅓ of the flour.
  
• Once everything has been just barely incorporated, pour about half the batter (470 grams) into the prepared cake pan. Spoon the warmed chocolate-hazelnut spread over the batter, then gently spread it out to cover the batter out to the edges of the pan. Cover the chocolate-hazelnut layer with the second half of the coffee cake batter, then smooth out the top with an offset spatula. Evenly sprinkle the top with the prepared peanut butter crumble.
  
• Baked the coffee cake for about 50 minutes. If necessary, cover the top of the coffee cake midway through baking if the crumb is browning too quickly. The cake is done when a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, with no crumbs stuck to it. Be careful here, as my final tester looked clean but my cake was slightly underdone.
  
• Let the cake cool 10 minutes in the pan, then remove the sides and bottom of the springform pan and let the cake continue cooling on a wire rack.
  
• Serve this coffee cake warm or at room temperature, with a side of fresh berries and whipped cream if desired.
  

Notes

*you can use a lower-fat sour cream, creme fraiche, or plain yogurt in place of the sour cream, but the cake will dry out faster and thus have a shorter shelf life.

**you can use a different milk here without substantial impact, from nonfat to half-and-half to non-dairy.

***you can use a regular cake pan if you don't have a springform, but it will be  challenging to extract the coffee cake without scattering crumbs all over your kitchen, and you may need to cut out a center piece first.