Some travel souvenirs are edible. This one is a cake. A spiced coffee and walnut layer cake has been doing the rounds on New Zealand food site fresh.co.nz, and it reads like the kind of bake you'd stumble across in a good Wellington or Auckland café and immediately want to recreate at home — strong coffee, warm spice, plenty of walnuts and a fudgy chocolate icing on top.
The idea is simple but clever. Instead of just adding instant coffee to the batter, you brew a fresh cup and steep a cinnamon stick and four cardamom pods in it while it cools. The spice-infused coffee then gets folded into the mix, so the flavour runs through the whole crumb rather than sitting on the surface. It's a trick worth remembering for any coffee-flavoured bake.
The rest is straightforward. Butter and caster sugar are beaten until light and fluffy, eggs, self-raising flour and a little baking powder go in, then the cooled spiced coffee and two-thirds of a cup of chopped walnuts. The batter is divided between two lined 20cm springform tins and baked at 180C for 25 to 30 minutes, until golden, risen and clean-skewered. After five minutes in the tins, the cakes cool completely on a wire rack — don't rush this bit, or the icing will melt.
That icing is where the cake earns its keep. It's a chocolate coffee buttercream: butter whipped with sieved cocoa, icing sugar beaten in for a minute, then 30ml of coffee added a splash at a time until it's spreadable. Half goes between the layers, half on top, and a scatter of dark chocolate shavings and extra walnuts finishes it off. It's generous, old-fashioned layer-cake territory — the sort of thing that disappears fast at a table of six.
Why is a recipe on a travel site? Because food is often the most lasting memory of a trip, and recreating a café-style bake at home is one of the easiest ways to bring a place back with you. It's also a good skill to have on the road: if you're staying in a self-catering bach, villa or apartment — a very New Zealand way to holiday — this is a weekend project that needs little more than an oven, two tins and a mixer. Bring the cake out on a rainy afternoon after a beach walk and you've got the whole holiday-in-one-photo thing sorted.
A few practical pointers if you attempt it. Brew the coffee first so it has time to cool while you prep everything else — hot coffee in the batter is the one real way to mess this up. Freshly brewed filter or plunger coffee gives better flavour than instant. And if cardamom pods aren't in your spice rack, the cake still works without them, though the gentle spice note is what lifts it above a standard coffee cake.
It's a slice of New Zealand café culture you can bake anywhere in the world — no boarding pass required.