More of a Crumble than a Ramble

 

The other day I arrived at school at 6:40 am.  The building where my 8 am class is not open until 7.  I tried my id card on the keypad to no avail.  I tried even though I already knew that I was not authorized to enter that building off-hours.  So, not having had my morning coffee, I walked a few blocks to the Starbucks to get a double espresso.  In a usual lack of willpower, I ordered something sweet to go with the coffee.  I opted for a piece of the coffee cake.  I sat in a corner of the shop and sipped the coffee and ate the coffee cake.

Growing up, my mother would get an Awrey’s coffee cake that had icing, raisons, and crumbles now and again.  I probably got the coffee cake because I was in a nostalgic mood that morning and I can’t remember the last time I had a piece of coffee cake.  As I sat there reminiscing, I noted that the Starbuck’s coffee cake was more of a cake then the bready Awrey’s version.  The Starbuck’s coffee cake had no raisons, no icing, and the top was all crumbs which were darker brown and finer grained compared to the Awrey’s.

I got to thinking about the crumbs, the crumble, on top of coffee cake.  Where do they come from?  Were there crumble trees? Crumble plants?  Are these crumbs a fruit?  A vegetable?  A nut?  How were they harvested?  How were they processed?  Are they native to the US or from some far off place like Mexico or Belize where vanilla beans come from?  Perhaps it was a sweet, rare fungus.  Maybe the crumble is mined like copper in Antifagasta or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

The caffeine stimulation kicked in and I laughed at these silly theories.  I reaoned that I was in a nostalgic mood relieving the coffee cake part of my childhood and thus I came up with the kinds of theories I would have conjured up when I was six years old.  Bottom line?  I really had no clue what crumbles were or how they are made.

I did not give it another thought until my drive home after teaching my two morning classes.  I still had no idea how the crumbles were made.  And then a lightening bolt thought shot across my consciousness: “Duh, just do a Google it.”  That first thought was quickly followed by another thought in my maternal grandmother’s voice, “how stupid I could be?”  Not surprisingly, the tasty crumbs are a baked good.  Here is a recipe slightly edited from damneddelicious.net.

 

For the crumb topping

1 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

 

Combine sugars, cinnamon and salt in a medium bowl. Whisk in melted butter. Add flour and stir using a rubber spatula just until moist. Spread out mixture on parchment paper to dry until ready to use.

 

After the cake batter is evenly poured into a baking dish, sprinkle with the dry crumble topping, using your fingertips to gently press the crumbs into the batter.  Bake the cake.

 

Sugar, brown sugar, and butter, no wonder the crumbs taste so good.  The mix these ingredients with flour until there were dry and then baked atop the cake.  No wonder they crumble so well.

Now that this mystery is cleared up, I am inspired to solve more.