Trying Out A New Recipe: Pumpkin Spice Coffee Cake

I am someone who is a big fan of seasonal flavors. I like eggnog in the winter, floral flavors in the spring, fresh watermelon and tomatoes in the summer, and of course, pumpkin spice and warm apple-y flavors in the fall. So this Pumpkin Spice Coffee Cake by Handle the Heat seemed like the perfect thing to make. Plus, everything I’ve made from her has been banger, so I was excited to try this recipe.

Here is everything you need:

Just kidding! My forgetful self completely left the butter and can of pumpkin puree out of the picture. Even though it’s PUMPKIN spice coffee cake. So, just pretend there’s a 3tbsp knob of butter in the photo and a big can of pumpkin puree, okay? Thanks.

For this recipe, I actually didn’t need to buy anything! I literally had everything on hand, which was surprising because I usually don’t have pecans, and sour cream is a pretty inconsistent item in my household, too. I had bought the pecans for a salad I made a while back, but it’s definitely the first time in a while I’ve had something like that on hand. As for the pumpkin puree, I specifically bought several cans as soon as I saw it come into stores so I could make seasonal stuff for the next couple weeks. This was my last can, though, so I’ll need to restock soon.

Moving on, the first thing I needed to do was make the streusel. All this required was melting the butter in a bowl and add the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and pecans to it. I just used a fork to mix it together and got this:

Simple enough!

After that came the dry ingredients, which I just threw together in a bowl:

I actually found this recipe’s dry ingredients interesting, because it had me add the brown sugar and white sugar to the mixture. In most recipes, sugar gets added to the butter, eggs, vanilla, and other wet ingredients. It’s very rare for sugar to be included in the dry ingredients bowl, in my experience.

As for the wet ingredients, it was just the pumpkin puree, oil, sour cream, and eggs:

Another interesting thing about this recipe was that it had me add the wet ingredients to the dry. Usually it’s the other way around, but this one even had me make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients specifically to pour the wet ingredients into. I’m not sure it really matters which way you do it.

Anyways, it came together perfectly and I poured it into a parchment paper lined 8×8 metal pan:

After pouring it all in at once, I realized I was supposed to have poured half in, then added half the streusel, and then add in the other half of the batter, followed by the rest of the streusel. Since I poured it all in at once, I just decided to put all of the streusel on top! Easy enough fix, I figured.

And wouldn’t you know it, it covered the top perfectly!

I put it in the oven at 350 for 35 minutes. My house started to smell totally amazing, and finally I took this beauty out of the oven:

Well, I guess you can’t really see what it looks like since it’s mostly just streusel.

While it was cooling, I made the maple glaze, which was literally just powdered sugar and maple syrup. I used Domino powdered sugar and Crown maple syrup, and whisked it together in a small bowl:

Definitely not that impressive looking, but once I put it on the freshly cut coffee cake, it looked damn good.

This coffee cake was literally fan-flipping-tastic. I really had to sit there and contemplate if this coffee cake was the single greatest thing I had ever made. And honestly, it might be. It was warm, perfectly spiced, wonderfully sweet, incredibly moist from the sour cream. This gets said a lot, and I mean a lot, but it tasted like fall.

I really cannot recommend this recipe enough, it was surprisingly easy, and the results are just amazing.

Both my parents tried the cake and said it was super good, and my friend I gave it to asked if I had bought it from an actual bakery.

This cake is an easy way to impress your friends, family, coworkers, even strangers will be blown away by this delicious coffee cake. I made another batch like two days later. I will probably make several more over the course of the next couple months. The recipe says I can just double it in a 13×9 and add like five minutes to the cook time, so I might try that next time.

Do you like pumpkin spice? Are you a fan of coffee cake? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS