A vintage torta al caffè, coffee cake

A recipe from one my grandma's cookbooks, my dad's favourite for his birthday

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That’s your second coffee cake for the day, and there’s a reason why you are getting two recipes apparently so similar. If the first one was focused all around the combination of olive oil and espresso, this one is instead deliciously rich in butter, and it’s a family classic.

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My dad retired just before Covid. He had been working for the same company since he was nineteen, designing the moulds of crystal glasses for which my town has been famous for decades.

Every year on the 5th of March, for his birthday, he would bring two cakes to celebrate the day with his colleagues. My mum and my grandma were always involved in the baking, always the same cakes, until I stepped up with new ideas. Yet, the apple cake, the jam crostata and especially my nonna’s coffee cake were always my dad’s favourites (and his colleagues, too).

Last week, I picked one of my grandma’s cookbooks, the one I gave her for Christmas almost 30 years ago, to make again her coffee cake after so many years. This cake is legendary.

She warned me to follow the notes she had added with her beautiful old-school handwriting. “Even though I always follow a recipe exactly as it is, for this cake I made a few tweakings, as it was always too small. It was good, I remember I baked it for your aunt’s anniversary party, and there was a man, who had a bakery, and he told me how good the cake was…” she was bursting with pride.