Begging pardon from bubbly water, but there may be no greater friend and accomplice to coffee than that of the coffee cake. The way the sweet nosh compliments the bitter in the beverage, it’s some sort of sensorial alchemy that I don’t understand and don’t care to, the transubstantiation of hot brown liquid and cake into pure sweet, caffeinated divinity.But why is coffee cake called “coffee cake”? Is it made with coffee? Or was the sweet treat created entirely to play sidekick to coffee, its mere existence so indebted to its namesake beverage that it shouldn’t even be considered outside that context? To know the coffee cake is to know its past. To learn why exactly this is a “coffee” cake, we have to go through over 300 years of history, and as it turns out, the answer may depend on what country you live in.Coffee cake as we know it today wasn’t so much a creation as it was an evolution, with many countries given as the potential origination point. It is generally accepted that coffee...
