Strawberry Rhubarb Coffee Cake

Cake for Breakfast: a love letter to birthday snack cakes.

Hi Bakers!

What do you eat for dessert when you are a professional baker and it’s your birthday? This is a question I get asked often. 

Do I bake my own cake? Does someone else in my family make one? Do we skip cake all together and just go for ice cream? All of the above are acceptable options, including the cookies my husband baked for me over the weekend (you know CCC’s are not so secretly my favorite dessert). 

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My daughter, bless her, asked if I had to work on my birthday. The answer was yes, because bringing basic ingredients to life between my own hands is still one of the activities I enjoy most. 

With our busy schedules, time is often the ultimate gift. So even on my birthday, it was a treat to slowly cook down vibrant rhubarb and strawberry into a sweet and tangy compote, to rub flour, sugar, and butter between my fingertips into a crumble, and stir together a sour cream cake base so tender and yielding to whatever fruit and crumb topping I decide to dump on it. 

This is the type of snack cake that can be served for breakfast while moonlighting as dessert. It is sturdy enough to pack for a picnic and can be enjoyed with or without plates and utensils. 

What I really love about this cake is all the different textures. Trying to coax some of the batter on top of the compote leads to organic layers of cake, fruit, and sugary crumble where crunchy cake tops jut up between pools of sticky sweet jam.

Let’s take a look at the topography of a jammy crumb cake: 

First we’ve got a tender, butter cake base. It can be eaten out of hand without falling apart or being too tough or dense.

Then we have the strawberry rhubarb compote. This jammy layer adds loads of flavor. Some of the batter gets added on top while other pockets of compote are bare and left to caramelize further in the oven. 

Lastly, the top crumb layer. It is craggy and a bit haphazard with cinnamon sugar crunch. It’s also my favorite part.