Crumb Coffee Cake

By the 1950s the United States was a nation of habitual coffee drinkers, thanks to post—World War II promotional campaigns by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau and others. These showed Hollywood stars, often in formal dress, enjoying a ritual that was adopted from industrial-era mills: the coffee break. Plain cakes such as pound cakes, marble cakes, and crumb cakes were renamed coffee cakes, and became instant classics of our American baking repertoire. Unadorned except perhaps for a drizzle of icing, a slice of coffee cake is easily eaten out of hand; I learned to love both baking and eating them early on because of their ease of preparation and their simple and straightforward flavors and textures. —Nick Malgieri, author of Bread (Kyle Books, 2012)