I love American coffee cake. The first time I tried it I was a little confused because I was like where is the coffee ???
But I understand it now, it’s not supposed to have coffee. It’s just a nice cinnamony cake that is supposed to be eaten with coffee.
But I recently found out that coffee cake cookies was a thing, this sounded sooooo good to me so here we are.
Video Tutorial
What makes these coffee cake cookies?
I’m not an expert in American coffee cake, but from what I’ve seen and tried, it is essentially a cake that has cinnamon added to it.
Then it is topped with a crumble/streusel, and a lot of times an icing is added too.
I would say the main elements are cinnamon, the crumble and the icing.
So when making these cookies, I wanted to add these element into them.
So I made a cinnamon cookie, topped this with a crumble, and then once they were baked and cooled, I drizzled an icing over them.
And now you have coffee cake cookies.
The flavour of these WAS SO GOOD, the cookie was soft but crispy on the outside and the crumble added a nice texture.
I loved these so much, I think they’re my favourite cookies I’ve made in a while.
The cookie dough
The first thing we are going to make is the cookie dough.
Here are the ingredients you will need for this:
- Unsalted butter – I like to use unsalted butter so that I can control the amount of salt in the recipe. But salted butter does work too, just don’t add any extra salt.
- Sugar – I used a mixture of both brown and white sugar. The brown sugar adds a lot of flavour and moisture, and the white sugar add crispiness.
- Vanilla
- An egg
- Plain flour – also known as all purpose flour.
- Ground cinnamon
- Salt – leave this out if you’re using salted butter.
- Raising agents – I used both baking powder and baking soda. The baking soda gives the cookies some thickness and the baking soda helps them spread.
Leave this cookie dough to chill
Once you have made the cookie dough, it’s important to leave it to chill.
This cookie dough is being made with melted butter, so it is going to be soft. The butter needs time to set up.
If you try forming the dough into balls and then baking them, the cookies will spread way too much. You will end up with extremely flat cookies, we do not want this.
So make sure to chill it. Just leave it in your freezer for about 20-30 minutes.
The crumble
Whiles your cookie dough is chilling, you can make the crumble.
For this, I used:
- Plain flour
- Oats
- Brown sugar
- Cinnamon
- Unsalted butter
Can I leave out the oats?
I really like oats in my crumbles, I think they add a nice texture. But from reading my comments, I have learnt that not everyone likes it.
If you are one of these people, you could leave the oats out.
But you might need to add a little more flour.
Just mix everything together, and if the crumble seems too soft, mix in some more flour.
Baking the cookies
Once your cookie dough has set a bit and the crumble has been made. You can roll the dough into balls, press the crumble onto them and then bake them.
As your cookies bake and spread, the crumble isn’t going to spread as much. So after 10 minutes, I took them out of the oven and pressed some more crumble into them. So that the crumble is covering the whole surface of the cookies.
The recipe below will make enough crumble so you can do this.
But then continue baking them for about 10-12 minutes. Then leave them to cool.
THESE COOKIES WILL BE SOFT AFTER BAKING
These cookies will be very soft at first, please don’t try picking them up from the tray straight away. They will fall apart.
As they cool they will set up. So give them some time.
The icing
The icing on top is completely optional, you do not need to add this. The cookies taste just as good without it.
But if you are adding it, it’s just icing sugar/powdered sugar and water. All you do is mix these together.
If you want you could also add some vanilla extract into it, for some extra flavour.
But then drizzle or pipe this over your cooled cookies, let the icing set for a bit, then the cookies are done you can dig in.
Here are a few other cookies recipes I think you might also like:
Coffee
Cake Cookies
Ingredients
Makes: 6 cookies
- For the cookie dough:
180g unsalted butter
80g light brown sugar
80g granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg
250g plain flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- For the crumble:
80g plain flour
50g oats
50g light brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
50g unsalted butter, melted
- For the icing:
80g icing sugar
1-2 tablespoons water
Directions
- Making the cookie dough:
- Start by browning your butter, so add the butter into a pot and place this onto medium-low heat. Keep heating this, whiles stirring, until the butter turns a light brown colour. You will notice the butter will go through stages, it will start bubbling then it will start to foam. Once the foam subsides, that's when it will be brown.
- Pour this into a large bowl then leave this to cool down for 5 minutes.
- Add both sugars and vanilla into this and whisk this well.
- Now add the egg and aggressively whisk this mixture for about 30 seconds.
- In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, salt, baking powder and baking soda.
- Add this into the other bowl and mix until a dough forms and you can no longer see any flour.
- Your cookie dough will be too soft at this point, so put it into your freezer and leave to chill for about 20-30 minutes.
- The crumble:
- Meanwhile, make the crumble.
- Just add all of the ingredients into a bowl and mix until you get a crumbly mixture. I also like to squeeze this mixture in my hands, this helps give you bigger clumps of crumble.
- Leave this in your fridge until you're ready to use it.
- Baking the cookies:
- About 10 minutes before you're ready to bake your cookies, pre-heat your oven to 180c/350f. Also line a large baking tray with some baking paper.
- Once your cookie dough has chilled, take it out of the freezer and divide the dough into 6 balls. Each one of my cookie dough balls were around 100g.
- Get your crumble and press this onto the cookie dough balls, you want to cover the whole surface. The crumble isn't going to stick perfectly to the cookie dough, some of it will fall off but we'll add more later.
- Add your cookie dough balls onto your lined baking tray, making sure to leave gaps between them so they have room to spread.
- Bake in your pre-heated oven for 10 minutes.
- After 10 minutes, take the tray out of the oven. You will have some crumble leftover, press this onto your half baked cookies.
- Place your cookies back into the oven and bake for another 10-12 minutes.
- Once baked, they will be very soft. Leave them on the tray to cool and set up.
- The icing:
- In a bowl, add the icing sugar and 1 tablespoon of water. Mix these together.
- You want a slightly runny, but pipeable mixture. If you feel like it's too thick, mix in some more water. Or if you feel like it has become too thin, mix in some more icing sugar.
- Pipe or drizzle this onto your cooled cookies, let the icing set up for a few minutes, then you can enjoy!
