A literal coffee cake!

We at A Book of Cookrye have been pondering coffee. Also, it's the middle of the night and we're making a pot of it.

We'd like to think the coffeemaker looks like a 19th century teapot with a cord coming out of its butt.

As we've previously dissertated, we require heavy amounts of condiments to make coffee drinkable. A coffee made to Book of Cookrye standards tends to look like this:

We're between sessions right now (spring classes are over and summer hasn't started yet), which gives us time to think- straight, unsweetened chocolate tastes unbearably bitter to most people. However, when heavily sweetened, it becomes divoon to most of the world. This thought led to...

Coffee Cake ½ c butter 1 c sugar 2 eggs ½ c strong, cold coffee 1 tsp baking powder 1½ c flour Heat oven to 325°. Grease a round cake pan. This cake might be sticky, so if you really want to be sure it'll come out neatly, dust the pan with flour after greasing it. Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, beating in each thoroughly. Alternately add the flour in three additions and the coffee in two, starting the flour. Add the baking powder with the first portion of flour. Pour into the pan and bake until done, about 30-45 minutes.

When we at A Book of Cookrye make coffee cake, we take the notion of coffee cake literally.
The first thing to do of course is turn the coffee into cold coffee. We at A Book of Cookrye don't know why it's supposed to be cold when you add it, but for some reason we suspected it should be. However, we didn't feel like fetching out a plate to cool it on.

We were going to need to get out a cake pan anyway.

One of the nicer things about where we're decamped for the summer is that it has smaller lights right over the counter. After spending all day working in an overlit and fluorescent space, it's nice to come home and be in dim light. Honestly, spending enough day in such excessively bright places make us wish we could do everything by candles or gaslight without running afoul of fire codes.

Also, the directional lights make it look like we're coming out of a 1980s cookbook.

And now, we turn this from a regular cake into a coffee cake! Either that or we had an oil spill into the cake batter.

It's a plague of caffeination spreading through the dessert!

This cake was an odd color. I never thought it would be odd, but it was. It's not a yellow cake, but it's not dark enough to be a spice cake or any of the other cakes that come out a brown color. It's kind of... beige. Like, you think you're looking at a white cake that for some reason has been dimmed. I know it looks fairly dark in this picture, but I assure you it wasn't.

Perplexingly, the kitchen smelled like chocolate chip cookies as this baked. Where did the chocolate come from? Also, the top of this was oddly sparkly after it came out of the oven.

Yeah, the odd color shows up better now that it baked. It almost looked like a color correction mistake happened to a slice of yellow cake. Silly photo editor, the cake was supposed to be that color! Why did you darken it?
The cake tasted like sliceable iced coffee. We at A Book of Cookrye loved it.