Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake

It may look like a giant sticky bun, but there’s far more to this yeasted coffee cake than that….

The dough itself is beautiful…..tender and airy and lightly spiced with cardamom, and very easy to make. It mixes up like a thick cake batter, but after its first rise, can be rolled out easily. It’s spread with a cinnamon-butter mixture and cut into strips which are then coiled around each other. There’s a trick to finding the correct tension for the coil which I didn’t quite master: the centre of mine was coiled too tightly, so it rose up, and the outer layers were coiled too loosely, so they spread outwards, resulting in an uneven cake.

The dough is baked in a butterscotch sauce after its second rise. I lost a little of this sauce through a leak in my springform pan, but there was still enough to glaze the top of the cake and add a little sweetness, but not enough to detract from the star of this dessert, the yeasted cake.