I Am Going On A Coffee Cake Sabbatical. But First I Did Make the 1954 LAUSD Recipe

I was just trying to do something nice.

For our Fall Member Drive that began last week, I wanted to bring in some kind of baked good to support the people on air. (Hosting Member Drive is a lot of work.)

Because it was National School Lunch Week, and I’m the Senior Editor for Education, I thought of something that fit that occasion as well: A baked good that met federal and state nutrition guidelines.

And in Los Angeles, frankly, there is one school-based baked good that reigns supreme: The coffee cake.

I, along with my colleague, LAist Engagement producer Adriana Pera, made this first coffee cake healthy … well, healthier. Avocado oil instead of vegetable oil. Apple sauce in place of some of that avocado oil. Whole wheat flour in place of some all-purpose flour. It also had milk powder, which has protein. Sweet, and strengthening? I think you'll agree: Coffee cake, a new superfood.

The outpouring of interest from readers and listeners, and the reminiscence over this coffee cake, lifted the soul. I have loved seeing the shared recollection. They say smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, and this coffee cake sure smelled good.

And it had better smell good: A lot of labor went into it. Adriana and I spent hours in the kitchen, measuring cinnamon and nutmeg to exact standards. We even used a food scale! (Well, we talked about it, but I didn't remember where I'd placed mine.)

All this work, for my dear sweet colleagues. We delivered it to the office, in a state of triumph as they went into overdrive for this year's Fall Member Drive.

And then the subtle hints started dropping (they were not subtle): How does this compare to the original recipe? The one with all the bad-for-you stuff? "GIVE US THE OIL, CAKE MAN," they demanded. (But like in a pleasant, public media kind of way.)

Whereupon I went back to the grocery story, and thence to the kitchen, and re-measured the cinnamon and nutmeg and oil and all, and made yet another LAUSD coffee cake, straight out of 1954.

A beautiful, perfect coffee cake about to go into the oven.

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Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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A perfect coffee cake, some might say.

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Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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My colleagues pounced on it. (The ones who follow our free food Slack channel did, anyway.) It held together a little better, but it was still light and fluffy. The color was surprisingly similar to the healthy version. They tasted ... just about the same.

“Solid,” one colleague constructively told me.

A funny coincidence: A lot of the people who had the first round were not in the office for the second round, and vice versa.

Which would mean that a true taste test would mean having both the original and the updated versions of the coffee cake in the same place at the same time. That would be a mere four pans of additional coffee cake.

One of the original recipes for LAUSD's coffee cake.

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Courtesy of Austin Beutner

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One of the original recipes for LAUSD's coffee cake.

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Courtesy LAUSD

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Instead: I’m done. I am now retiring from coffee cake, for now. Not from eating it — never from eating it — I am actually eating some right now.

LAUSD has other notable recipes too — many people mentioned the peanut butter bread. It sounds delicious. (You also won't find it in schools anymore, either — the district is nut-free, per Director of Food Services Manish Singh.) Maybe I’ll get around to it at our next Member Drive.

But it's time to move on to baking other things. To try to make my own recipe, that my colleagues will talk about 70 years from now.

It will smell perfect. It could be coffee cake. We will still be in Member Drive.