Buttermilk Coffee Cake

The blog passed a milestone I almost missed: five hundred posts. Five hundred weeks of writing about food and life and the kitchen that holds both. Five hundred Mondays of soup beans. Five hundred recipes, stories, letters to a readership that started at twenty and now numbers — I checked, because Connie made me check — somewhere around four thousand regular readers. Four thousand people who check in weekly to read about an Appalachian man making his mother's recipes in a kitchen in Lexington. Four thousand people who care about pinto beans and cast iron and the specific love of a family that communicates through food because the words are too heavy for the mouth but the right weight for a wooden spoon.

I got an email this week from a woman in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, New York. She said she's never been to Kentucky, never been to Appalachia, never eaten a soup bean. But she reads the blog every week because "the love in your kitchen feels like the love in my mother's kitchen in Trinidad, where the food was different but the hands were the same." The hands were the same. A woman in Brooklyn, whose mother cooked Trinidadian food, reads my Appalachian blog and recognizes her own mother's hands. That's the thing. That's the answer to the question I've never asked, which is "Why does this matter?" It matters because the hands are the same everywhere. The recipes are different. The ingredients are different. The mountains and the islands and the cities are different. But the hands — the mother's hands, the grandmother's hands, the hands that stir and knead and chop and serve — are the same. Universal. Human. The hands are the recipe.

This week I made something I haven't made in a while: stack cake. Betty's stack cake. Eight layers. Dried apple filling. Assembled the night before, the way it's meant to be — layers softening overnight as the apple moisture seeps into the cake and transforms it from cookies and jam into something unified, something whole. I made it because five hundred weeks deserves a stack cake and because the stack cake is the most Appalachian thing I make and because five hundred weeks of writing about Appalachian food should be crowned with the dessert that is, in its layered, patient, time-dependent construction, the perfect metaphor for the blog itself: layers. Stories. Time. Something that gets better overnight. Something that is more than the sum of its parts.

I made Betty’s stack cake for the milestone, and I won’t pretend otherwise — but a stack cake takes eight layers and an overnight rest and a level of commitment that not everyone reading this has time for on a Tuesday. So here’s what I’m leaving you with instead: a Buttermilk Coffee Cake, which carries that same spirit of patience and care, the kind of thing your grandmother made for a reason, with a crumb that stays tender because the buttermilk does its quiet work. Five hundred weeks of writing about love in the kitchen deserves a cake, and this one — simple, generous, unfussy — is for everyone whose hands are the same.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 50 minutes | Servings: 12

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar, divided
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, divided
1/4 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

Instructions

Preheat and prepare. Heat your oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x13-inch baking pan or a 9-inch square pan and set aside.
Make the streusel topping. In a small bowl, combine 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and nuts if using. Mix with a fork until crumbly. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter with the granulated sugar and remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add the wet ingredients. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla extract. Add the buttermilk and mix until just combined — the batter may look slightly curdled; that’s the buttermilk doing its job.
Fold in the dry ingredients. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon in a separate bowl. Gently fold the dry mixture into the wet ingredients until just incorporated. Do not overmix.
Assemble and bake. Pour the batter evenly into the prepared pan. Scatter the streusel topping over the surface. Bake for 32—38 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the top is golden.
Cool before serving. Let the cake rest in the pan for at least 15 minutes before slicing. Serve warm or at room temperature. It keeps well, covered, for up to three days — and like most good things, it gets a little better on day two.

Nutrition (per serving)

Buttermilk Coffee Cake — A Layer of Sweetness for Five Hundred Weeks