Crumb Cake Is Better When It’s Mostly Crumb

A good crumb cake—like the ones I grew up with in New Jersey—is top heavy. The simple vanilla cake supports a thick second story of tender, cinnamon-laced, brown sugar streusel and a snowcap of powdered sugar. At New Jersey bakeries, crumb cake is typically sold by the rectangular slice directly from the sheet pan; at delis, you’ll often find slices wrapped individually in plastic (environmentally distressing, but this does create, in my opinion, the perfect extra-moist texture). For those who do not live close enough to purchase such a treat on a lazy weekend morning, I set out on a quest to develop a recipe for the closest possible iteration that doesn’t use any special equipment or hard-to-find ingredients (you’re welcome).

Crumb cake’s presumed predecessor is German streuselkuchen, a yeasted cake topped with a modest layer of crunchy streusel. As Americans love to do everything bigger, many of today’s crumb cakes have evolved into nearly a 1:1 ratio of crumb to cake—and many are even more generous with the crumb. Some add in a layer of jam or flavor the cake with chocolate or warm spices as they do at Park Ridge bakery Just Crumb Cake. But across the board, the topping isn’t the same crispy-crumbly streusel you’d find on a berry crumble or pie: It’s thick and soft, with an almost cookie-dough-like texture. The general components needed are flour (more on which kind in a minute), sugar (mostly brown, sometimes a bit of granulated or powdered), and fat (significantly more than you’d expect), but there’s no consensus among bakers from there.

Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken actually uses crumbled premade vanilla cake in their crumb topping, which reminds me a bit of the method used to make a cake pop. “If you go back to the old traditions of bakers, they never wasted anything,” Joe Faugno, head baker at Carlo’s Bakery, notes in a YouTube tutorial of their crumb cake recipe. “They figured a way to use up the leftover cake that they couldn’t serve to customers.” The crumbled cake is paddled in a stand mixer with softened butter, pastry flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt; then left to rest at room temperature for an hour to firm up. Using cold butter in the topping and/or chilling it before baking can help the crumbs hold their shape as the cake bakes. However, chilling the topping, especially when you’re not mixing it with tender cake crumbs, can make for a slightly dry end result.