At my school growing up in Michigan, I don’t even remember the dessert options. Sometimes there was a cobbler thing. There were also Hostess snacks — Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, that kind of stuff.
Everyone who attended a school in Los Angeles Unified, however, knows about the coffee cake.
The recipe goes back decades. This very site has waxed poetic about it.
“The coffee cake is iconic,” says Manish Singh, director of food services at LAUSD.
But here’s the question: Is it worth making at home? Is this indelible culinary experience so tied to a person’s childhood that it should be considered forbidden as a personal endeavor?
LAist Engagement producer Adriana Pera and I, senior editor for education, set out to find an answer.
We bring important personal history to this experiment: Adriana first sampled the coffee cake in question when she worked as an assistant for an LAUSD middle school summer program.
And I … like coffee cake.
In the spirit of every online food blog, here’s a lot of context you didn’t ask for before we actually talk about the dish.
The short version: There are competing versions of the original recipe, neither of which you would find in a school in 2023.
(The recipes look a little different, but a clever baker will notice the sneaky similarities: One recipe uses milk powder and an oil/vinegar solution — in other words, deconstructed buttermilk. The other main difference is the final amount of cake you end up with.)
Over several decades, the original coffee cake recipe (or at least, as approximate an original recipe as we can find) has undergone several changes, in time with school lunch standards.
For example: The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2012 pressed schools to offer more fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and research showed it led to healthier outcomes for kids. Some of those rules were rolled back in subsequent years, but in 2023 the Department of Agriculture added new rules that cut back on added sugars and salt.
What does that mean for our coffee cake? Gone are the trans fats. Whole grains have taken over for a chunk of the all-purpose flour. Sugar … well, it’s still not sugar free. But the current version certainly has fewer calories.
“Some people come and say I want all the fat,” Singh said. “And I'm like, OK, but we've had to make changes.”
He added that it doesn’t seem to bother most people.
“Last year, we were doing our employee appreciation month downtown in Beaudry [LAUSD headquarters],” Singh said. “They said, 'Can we get the coffee cake?' And I said, 'Sure.' We had to bring it on two occasions and we ran out both times. So people have this memory of the coffee cake and the same thing goes for the students.”
First: In the spirit of the nutritional rules, Adriana and I did some quick math. At least 80% of all grains offered weekly in school lunch “must be whole grain-rich,” so we subbed out half the all-purpose flour for whole wheat flour.
What that does: You’ll get a browner sponge. It also makes the cake a little more crumbly, as the bran in whole wheat literally severs the connections between the gluten.
Second: The recipe calls for about a cup of oil. As far as which type, the recipe is unspecific, but if you’ve made box brownies before then you’ll likely reach for vegetable or canola oil. We opted for the relatively flavorless, albeit more expensive, avocado oil. We also … went a little off script, substituting in a bit of sugarless applesauce to reduce the fat without adding sugar.
What that does: You likely can’t taste the avocado oil as much as you can taste vegetable oil or, especially, canola oil. And while applesauce can keep a cake moist, you also have to watch the bake time because the cake might dry out faster.
Here is some of the praise we gave ourselves:
For a true taste test, we sought out the opinions of honest teens: Spencer Madeley and Somer Staley, who attend LAUSD's Venice High. They have the real thing every week.
For ours, they gingerly sniffed and took a bite. They offered a pensive critique:
If we were going to bake it again: There’s a lot of nutmeg, which makes it taste like fall, although maybe we’d up the ratio of cinnamon. It could use some apple, and/or maybe some pecan?
Also: Maybe we should have stuck with buttermilk. We’re adults. We can do that.
Cake Ingredients (Dry)
Cake Ingredients (Wet)
Topping ingredients:
Oven temperature: 375 degrees
Directions:
Servings: 9 per pan (18 total), but it's big enough that you can easily cut into more pieces.
After publishing this story, we heard from students, graduates, and even former cafeteria workers across social media about how well they remember the coffee cake. We wrote more about that here.
Engagement producer Adriana Pera contributed to this story.
