Cinamon swirl apple coffee cake
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 60 minutes
- Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
- Yield: 1 cake 1x
Description
A gussied up box mix cake, filled with apples and a swirl of cinnamon sugar. Perfect dessert, snack or, let's be honest, breakfast.
Ingredients
- 1 ½ sticks (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
- 2 eggs
- ¾ cup sour cream
- 2 tablespoons heavy cream
- 1 box yellow cake mix
- ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
- ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
- 2 cups peeled, shredded apple (about 2 medium apples, I used honeycrisp)
- ¼ cup sugar
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a bundt pan.
- Using a stand or hand mixer, beat the butter on medium-high speed until it gets lighter and a little fluffy. It won't get as fluffy as when you cream butter and sugar together, but it's the same idea here.
- Add the eggs and sour cream and continue beating until smooth. Add heavy cream and mix again.
- Add cake mix, nutmeg, cloves and ginger and mix on low until just combined. A few little spots of flour are totally fine.
- Add apples and fold in until everything is mixed. Again, try not to overmix!
- Spread half of the batter into the pan, smoothing it into an even layer.
- Combine sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle evenly all over the batter.
- Add the remaining batter on top, dolloping it all over the first layer and then gently smoothing it out with a spatula so you don't totally disrupt the cinnamon sugar layer.
- Bake for 50-60 minutes, until a cake tester comes out with a few moist crumbs.
- Let cake cool in pan for 10-15 minutes, and then carefully use a butter knife to loosen cake from pan. Invert onto a wire cooling rack and let cool completely. This cake is best made the night before serving, but if it's day-of, at least let it cool for 4 hours before cutting!
I know some people have strong feelings about boxed cake mixes, but they are honestly so clutch. This cake is based off of one my mom has been making for years that is still one of my most favorite cakes in the world.
The texture is the BEST, mostly due to the amount of fat in this batter. Butter! Sour cream! Heavy cream! It's all there because it all needs to be there, okay? Or as my mom said as she was giving me this recipe over FaceTime, "fat is happy."
And thus my new life motto was born.
I have been wanting to share a coffee cake recipe on the blog for a while, but it's not something I make all that often. However, once fall hit over here (aka we had one day under 85 degrees), I couldn't get the idea of an apple coffee cake out of my head.
Last year I made an apple loaf cake around Thanksgiving, and it was SO delicious. This time I knew I wanted to make something a little more "classic coffee cake", and immediately thought of my mom's chocolate chip cake.
Yellow cake mix + fat + chocolate = YES. I just had to fall-ify it a bit. So I left out the chocolate here (sorry) and added allll the apples.
It took a couple of tries to get this one right, but I finally figured it out! I like to shred the apples on a box grater so they mix in fully and add apple goodness to the entire cake. For this one in particular, I added in a few chopped up apples as well just for fun. It's a total choose-your-own-adventure situation over here.
And we haven't even talked about the cinnamon swirl yet! Sugar and cinnamon sprinkled in the middle of the cake make for a sweet, slightly crunchy bite in each slice. Totally amazing with a cup of coffee, or just shoved into your mouth over the sink.
FAT. IS. HAPPY.
Can’t wait to make this on Sunday!
Yay!!Hope you love it!
Can’t wait to make this on Sunday!