Cafe con Leche Cake

Drink your coffee and eat it too! This Café con Leche Cake is deeply flavored with espresso milk in both the cake and the velvety icing. Delicious!

I grew up on Café con Leche. Having spent my early childhood in Nicaragua, it was a way of life. A cultural thing. I know what you’re thinking. Coffee & kids…not a good mix. While I do agree with that, in my family’s defense, it was more like coffee milk. A tiny bit of instant coffee powder and sugar mixed into hot milk. Just enough to turn the milk a light beige tinge. I remember 4-year old me dipping warm, crunchy bread in it and savoring every bite…coffee milk dripping down my face as I bit down into the moist bread. It made my soul very happy. Even our green Amazon parrot would have cafe con leche-soaked bread for breakfast and would ask for it by name (true story). More reasons to call the officials, but that parrot lived 100 years and I’m still around to write about it. No harm done.

My admiration for café con leche, which is basically a latté without the foam, continues today. I drink it every morning, made with freshly brewed espresso and milk or espresso powder and milk (if I’m short on time). This cake was born out of my love for my daily cup and an idea that popped into my head one morning while enjoying it. What if I could turn my favorite drink into a cake? The very notion excited me, and so my trials began.

I made this cake 5 times in a span of two weeks. My girls were excited at first, happily testing it for me. Once the third one hit the table, though, I could see the listless expression in their faces and I got comments like, “Ugh, is that the same cake?” and “Again mom?” to which I replied, “Yes, you will eat it until it’s right”. It was then that I realized I couldn’t trust their judgement anymore. They might say anything to get me to stop the madness. So, I sent one of my last trials to my neighbors and they gave it shining reviews. Success!

The ingredients are basic cake ones plus instant espresso powder, which is widely available and should be easy to find in most grocery stores. You’ll need flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, vanilla, milk, espresso powder, and powdered sugar (for the icing).

I knew I wanted to use instant espresso powder instead of brewed espresso to keep the recipe simple, but getting the amount right required lots of tweaking. I started out using only 1 tablespoon, worked my way up to 4, and then back down to 3. In order to make this cake true to its name, I decided to dissolve the espresso powder into the milk…basically creating a café con leche to add to the batter.

Then, I realized that as I increased the amount of coffee in subsequent cakes, the texture changed. I’m not sure what the chemistry behind that was, but it became a little dry. So, not wanting to sacrifice the coffee flavor by decreasing the amount of espresso, I added sour cream. That seemed to do the trick (once I got the amount right). Then, I tested oil vs butter (butter won), brown sugar vs regular sugar, number of eggs, leavening agents, and well…you get the picture. Truly, this recipe has been a labor of love. All for you 🙂

Whatever you do, do not skip the icing. It has amazing café con leche vibes going on. Easily my new favorite icing. I had brief, irrational thoughts of adding brown sugar to it and making it into a bath scrub. I think you’ll understand once you taste it. Next time, I might make extra so that every inch of the cake is covered in it, including the bottom somehow.

This Café con Leche Cake was fun to create and even more fun to eat. It’s simple to make and requires no fancy decorating. A perfect afternoon snack with a nice pick-me-up baked in because nothing goes better with your afternoon coffee than more coffee.