British Coffee Cakes Take A Literal Approach With This One Ingredient

If you often crave sweets while drinking coffee, you fit in with the large population who enjoy coffee cakes and pastries along with their cup of Joe. Per Medical News Today, the brain's adenosine receptors are blocked when caffeine is consumed, which can cause the average person to crave sweets until it wears off. Caffeine also dulls the taste of sweets, naturally increasing your desire to replenish it.

Because of this, coffee cakes tend to pair well with coffee beverages. According to Baking Kneads, many coffee cakes don't actually contain the ingredient; rather, they get their name from how well they complement coffee. These cakes were introduced to America by Germany, and they're typically made of pound cake with powdered sugar. However, the bitter yet sweet treat is made differently from country to country. According to Sprudge, Britain's coffee cake recipe is quite different than the one you'll find in the states, as it takes the meaning of its name a bit more seriously.

More than likely, you associate tea with Britain more than you do coffee. Though tea is the reigning hot beverage in the country, coffee has been climbing its way up the ladder as of late. Per British Coffee Association, 98 million cups of coffee are consumed every day in Britain, which may be a lot, but it doesn't hold a candle to the 400 million daily cups served in the United States. Either way, the United Kingdom takes pairing their coffee with a sweet treat seriously, which is why they take a literal route to coffee cake.

According to Sprudge, the coffee cake created in Britain has two layers of sponge cake and icing, each of which are coffee flavored or even coffee infused. Sometimes, the cake is decorated with walnuts, something that appeared in cookbooks in the 1920s (per Perfect Daily Grind). If you live in the United States and are hoping for coffee cake to give you a caffeine boost, it will be much harder to find. Coffee cake in North America is still made from sponge cake, but it has a cinnamon spice flavor with crumbles on top.