If you are a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, you may remember the coffee cake. We were having a little nostalgia over it, so we looked on the Internet to see if we could find a place to buy some. What we found was the original recipe on a bunch of different sites. So we printed it and baked some up.
The original 1954 LAUSD coffee cake recipe:
- 2 ½ cups Cake flour
- 1 cup brown sugar, packed
- ½ cup + 1 tbsp. granulated sugar
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
- ¾ cup vegetable oil
- 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- 1 large egg
- 1 cup buttermilk
Combine the first six ingredients. Mix until crumbly. Reserve ½ cup of the above for topping. Add the cinnamon. Combine the last four ingredients and add to the first mixture. Blend together, but do not over-mix.
Put in a greased 9” x 13” cake pan. (We don’t own one, so we used two round cake pans.) Sprinkle the cinnamon crumb topping over the top of the batter. Bake at 350 to 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
When we made this coffee cake the first time, we though that it was lacking more topping. So we decided to make more on the second go-around:
- 1 ¼ cups flour
- ½ cup brown sugar
- 4 ½ tbsp. granulated sugar
- ½ tsp. salt
- ½ tsp. ground nutmeg
- ½ tsp. ground cinnamon
- 6 tbsp. vegetable oil
Combine and mix until crumbly, sprinkle, and proceed to baking…
If you’re going to eat cake, especially for breakfast, this is a wonderful way to overdose on sweet, sugary nostalgia.
