Espresso Cake with Salted Caramel
A proper coffee sponge made with real espresso, topped with chocolate-covered coffee beans and finished with salted caramel.
- Total
- 1 hr
- Prep
- 20 min
- Bake
- 40 min
- Serves
- 10
- Level
- Easy
- Tin
- 20 cm springform
Coffee cake, in the British sense, is usually a sponge that has been shown a jar of instant and then apologised. The flavour is thin because coffee is mostly water, and water bakes off.
The fix is concentration: real espresso for the liquid, espresso powder for the depth, and brown sugar underneath both to give the whole thing a molasses floor to stand on.
Then salted caramel, taken darker than feels comfortable, poured warm.
Ingredients
For the cake
For the salted caramel
To finish
You will need
- 20 cm springform tin
- Heavy saucepan
- Wire rack
Method
Oven 175°C · fan 155°C · 345°F
Heat the oven and line the tin
Heat the oven to 175°C / 155°C fan. Butter a 20 cm springform tin and line the base.
Use both coffees
Stir the instant espresso powder into the cooled espresso until dissolved. Liquid coffee alone is not concentrated enough to survive baking; the powder is what makes the cake actually taste of coffee rather than of something brown.
Tip If you have no espresso machine, use 60 ml of boiling water with 3 teaspoons of instant espresso and cool it completely.
Cream and add the eggs
Beat the butter and brown sugar for 4 minutes until pale and fluffy, then beat in the eggs one at a time with a spoonful of flour each.
Fold everything together
Fold in the flour, baking powder and salt, then the coffee mixture, soured cream and vanilla.
Bake for 40 minutes
Bake for 38–43 minutes until springy and a skewer comes out clean.
Make the salted caramel
Melt the sugar in a heavy pan over a medium heat without stirring, swirling until deep amber. Off the heat, whisk in the butter cube by cube, then the warm cream, which will bubble hard. Stir in the flaky salt.
Tip Take the sugar further than feels safe. A pale caramel tastes only of sweet; the flavour lives right at the edge of too dark.
Release and top
Cool 20 minutes in the tin, unclip the ring, and scatter chocolate-covered espresso beans over the top.
Slice and pour
Cut wedges and pour the warm salted caramel over each one at the table.
Baker's notes
- Brown sugar rather than white is deliberate: its molasses note sits with coffee the way white sugar does not.
- Half a teaspoon of ground cardamom folded in with the flour turns this into something noticeably more interesting.
Keeping it 3 days in a tin at room temperature. The caramel keeps 2 weeks in the fridge; warm it gently to pour.
Questions, answered
Can I use instant coffee instead of espresso powder?
Instant espresso powder is much stronger and less bitter. Ordinary instant coffee works at one and a half times the quantity, but the flavour is flatter.
How dark should the caramel go?
Deep amber, the colour of an old penny, with a faint wisp of smoke. Pull it off the heat then, because it keeps darkening in the pan for another twenty seconds.
If it goes wrong
Three things account for most of what happens to a cake in a domestic oven. Each has its own guide.
- It sank in the middleSeven causes, told apart by the shape of the crater.
- It came out raw in the centreBrown outside, wet inside, and how to rescue the one you are holding.
- The caramel seizedIt is almost always fixable. The lump re-melts.
