Five o ‘clock and its tea time. And the tough question of ‘what to serve for tea?’ arises.

Well, we don’t have that problem at our place, as there is no tea time as such. Anytime is tea time. And anytime is snack time too!

So if you need a reason to bake these, call your friends. Ask them to come for a cup of tea. And serve these extremely soft coffee flavoured cake.

Coffee cake for a tea time get together….perfect!

Recipe Source: The Essential Baking Book, my main baking book :-)

Makes : 11X7″ cake

Ingredients:

• Butter                                         :            125 gm
• Powdered Sugar                       :            1 cup
• Eggs                                            :            3
• Vanilla Essence                        :            2 tsp
• Instant Coffee Powder            :            2 tsp
• Flour                                           :            1 1/4 cup
• Baking Powder                         :            1 tsp
• Sour Cream*                             :            1/3 cup

*To make sour cream, you can add 1/2 tsp vinegar to 1/3 cup milk and let it sit, covered, for 10 minutes.

For the Icing, if needed:

• Icing Sugar                                :            1 cup
• Coffee Powder                          :             2 tsp
• Butter                                         :            20 gm, melted
• Salt                                              :            a pinch

Method:

1. Pre heat oven to 160 C. Grease a 11X7″ pan and line with butter paper. The cake might over flow in a 8X8 pan, so fill accordingly.
2. Beat the softened butter, powdered sugar using a hand mixer. Once the butter/sugar mix is soft and fluffy, add in the eggs – one by one, and beat them in.
3. Dissolve the vanilla essence and coffee powder in one tbsp. warm water. Add this to the butter mix.
4. In a separate bowl, add the flour, baking powder and whisk until combined. Fold this to the butter mix, alternating with the sour cream. Stir until the batter is smooth (but don’t over mix).
5. Fill the greased pan till 3/4th and smooth the surface. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes or until a skewer comes free of crumbs when inserted in the middle. Let the cake cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then transfer to a cooling rack.
6. For the icing, melt the butter. Add coffee powder in 1-2 tbsp. of warm water. In a bowl mix the coffee powder mix, sugar and butter. This icing is really sweet, so I would suggest adding a small pinch of salt too. Spread this over the cooled cake.

This cake is shared with our BM participants, who are running a full month marathon this month. That means, a recipe a day for a whole month, from 20 plus bloggers! Isn’t that cool and exciting!?

Linking this recipe to Swathi’s Favorite Recipes hosted this month by Pallavi. The theme is Bookmarked Recipes.