Elevate Coffee Cake With Your Favorite Fruit Jam

With its delicate crumb and crunchy streusel, a homemade coffee cake is the perfect treat for an afternoon break or a delicious (if not decadent) way to start the day. Whether your tastes run to simple sour cream styles or rich, nutty options, your coffee cake recipe will be given a sweet twist with the addition of fruit jam.

It's a quick and easy step that can be done with any coffee cake. After adding your batter to the baking pan, simply spoon jam in large dollops over the surface. Take a knife or a toothpick and swirl the jam through the batter for a marbled effect, leaving some bigger sections of the jam intact. Top with streusel before baking.

Swirling in the jam is the quickest and easiest method, but you could also use jam to replace the middle streusel layer in a coffee cake. Add half of the batter to the baking dish before spreading evenly with jam, then carefully spread the remaining batter on top and bake as usual.

The best thing about this is that you don't need to adjust the recipe. Adding jam won't affect the consistency of the batter, unlike frozen fruit, which can release a lot of moisture during cooking and might need a thicker batter or a coat of flour to stop it from sinking.

A plain coffee cake is the ideal candidate for adding one or more fruit jams. Alternating swirls of apricot and raspberry jam in a vanilla batter will give you sweet, tangy flavors in every mouthful. You can also use jam as a substitute in a fruit-focused coffee cake, such as this blueberry-lavender coffee cake, if you don't have fresh fruit on hand.

By tweaking your streusel to complement the choice of jam, you can change the whole theme of your coffee cake. Dollops of cherry jam added to a chocolate streusel will give you rich black forest cake flavors, whereas combining pineapple jam with a coconut streusel will transport your tastebuds to the tropics.

Don't limit yourself to store-bought jam, either. Of course, it's a lot more work to make your own, but it allows you to customize the sweetness and experiment with flavors. A coffee cake with rosemary and pear jam will be a unique offering for your coffee break.