Adult Recipe: Cardamom Coffee Cake
A spiced coffee cake project, designed for adult cooks
I’ve been hearing from lots of folks that the design of my Nibblings recipes would be great for neurodivergent adults. I absolutely love this idea, because the same concepts of breaking tasks down, tracking time, and incorporating invisible steps would all be useful for people of all ages with executive functioning challenges or ADHD. This is a population I’ve worked with a lot, and I would be so excited to create delicious recipes that meet the needs of eager bakers looking for recipes with a more intentional design.
Existing Nibblings recipes are great for adults, but I often consider things like safety, tool accessibility, flavor preferences in ways that don’t necessarily apply to adults. That said, when my good friends and owners of the Brooklyn restaurant, Dilly Dally in Prospect Heights asked me to develop a coffee cake, I realized this was the perfect excuse to create an adult recipe based on Nibblings’ design principles.
Here it is, the first Nibblings recipe for adults!
Coffee cake is a classic, made to be enjoyed with your morning brew. It’s a bit less kid friendly because I have some coffee flavors in there, the steps are a bit more labor intensive, some require advanced planning (for example, taking the butter out of the fridge early to bring to temperature), and a stand mixer is a must!
I hope folks who are perhaps a bit intimated by larger baking projects find that the writing and design of this recipe makes the bake more manageable and still makes an incredible, bakery-worthy result. You can do this!
Reading this section is an investment to help you later in the baking. Do the work upfront so the work is easier throughout.
There are a few complicated elements throughout the recipe but I have designed it with those potential difficulties in mind. Trust in yourself, move one step at a time, and read and reread directions whenever you feel a little stuck or unsure.
Make a plan:
You should budget about 50 minutes of active time (give or take) for this recipe. Doing it in a rush will only complicate things further. It needs about 45 minutes in the oven and then should cool slightly in the pan. Additionally, the butter and eggs need to come to room temperature before you bake. That means you will have to remove those ingredients from the fridge at least an hour before you start baking.
Tip: If you know you’re baking later today. Just take them out now. Yes, right now. There is no real risk in having them out too early (unless it’s a very hot day) and the recipe depends on them not being too cold.
Here is a sample baking schedule:
Use a scale:
Using a scale makes for more accurate baking and better results. And it makes the entire baking process more streamlined. It means fewer tools, which means fewer transitions between tasks and fewer things to clean. It’s an easier way to bake, hands down. See a bit more about why I think this is so important in my article on scales here.
Most baking recipes rely on scale measurements, but include non-weight units (tsp, tbsp, cup) as well. While I highly recommend using a scale, I’ve created two versions of the recipe: one for baking with a scale, and one for baking without it. This way, you don’t need to figure out which measurements apply to you and what parts to ignore. Make sure you open the right one!
No scale? Use this recipe instead.
excited to try making this!!