The Unexpected Technique I Use to Recreate Sara Lee’s Iconic Coffee Cake (and Make It Even Better)

For as long as I can remember, my father has hosted Christmas brunch every year. The menu has remained relatively unchanged: My dad always fries up a pile of crispy bacon and my aunt Zapote always bakes her signature quiche Lorraine. The only thing missing nowadays is the Sara Lee pecan coffee cake my grandmother brought when she was alive.

With its tender crumb, sweet cinnamon filling, and toasted pecan topping, the cake was a delicious and much anticipated part of our family’s holiday traditions, and no one seemed to mind that it wasn’t homemade. What I remember most about that Sara Lee cake, which is made in the style of Danish brunsviger—a lightly sweetened yeasted coffee cake that’s typically eaten for breakfast or alongside a cup of coffee—is its soft, pillowy texture. Since my grandmother’s death, nobody else has brought the beloved cake to our Christmas gathering.

Though the classic Sara Lee cake was once easily found in the freezer aisle of most grocery stores, it’s much harder to come by today. I searched high and low for it in almost every major grocery store in my hometown of Seattle with no luck. I found the cake for sale on Amazon—but only in a pack that retailed for $86. If I wanted to enjoy my favorite Sara Lee coffee cake again, I would either have to shell out big bucks or recreate the recipe at home myself. I opted for the latter, and took it as an opportunity to make an even better version of the original with the help of my father, a fellow Sara Lee enthusiast. The result is a pastry I’d be happy to serve at my own holiday brunch each year: tender, subtly sweet, with a soft, springy crumb, and cinnamon-scented brown sugar and pecan filling.

4 Key Techniques for the Best Yeasted Coffee Cake 

For the Ideal Crumb, Incorporate a Tangzhong 

My first tests took inspiration from classic Danish yeasted cake recipes. The dough is enriched with butter, eggs, and sugar, then kneaded briefly and baked into a slightly bready cake. I loved the simplicity of these cakes, but they ultimately lacked the moisture and tenderness of the classic Sara Lee pecan coffee cake. For a softer cake, I decided to incorporate a tangzhong, a Taiwanese technique of cooking flour and water into a paste, which gives baked goods a super plush texture. Bakers often use tangzhong (and the related Japanese yudane and yukone) to prepare shokupan (Japanese milk bread), giving it its signature loft and tender crumb, and Serious Eats has a couple of Western recipes that also incorporate this technique, including  babka and crusty dinner rolls.

To make a tangzhong, you whisk together a slurry of milk and flour over medium heat until it thickens into a stretchy paste. This helps the starches in the flour gelatinize, allowing the flour to hold onto more water than if it was unheated. “Because a gelled mixture of flour and water is drier in texture than an identical ungelled one, it allows you to make a dough with more water in it than it could otherwise contain—without it turning to soup,” Serious Eats contributor Andrew Janjigian wrote in his shokupan recipe. “The extra water is there, but you can’t see or feel it in the dough.” This means the dough can include a lot of liquid without becoming unworkably wet, and lends the cake a soft, plush crumb that stays fresh for longer.

Enrich Your Dough

Like brioche, the dough for my yeasted coffee cake is enriched with butter, egg yolks, sugar, and milk, producing a rich, tender pastry reminiscent of a giant cinnamon bun. These ingredients have an important role in the dough’s structure: The butter and egg yolks coat the gluten proteins—glutenin and gliadin—in fat. This makes it more difficult for them to bond, minimizing gluten development. Like the butter and yolks, sugar also has a tenderizing effect on the dough. Instead of coating the gluten proteins, however, the sugar attaches itself to water molecules before the water has had a chance to bond with the gluten proteins and inhibits excessive gluten development. The result is a coffee cake that’s rich, tender, and toes the line between bread and cake.

Reach for Bread Flour

While we want to avoid excessive gluten development, we still want a cake with enough structure to support the air bubbles—or carbon dioxide—that’s produced by the yeast as the dough ferments. Flours have differing protein percentages, which indicate their gluten potential. All-purpose flour typically has a protein percentage of 9% to 12%, while bread flour tends to have 12% to 14% protein. Using bread flour may seem counterintuitive, since the objective here is a tender cake, but in this recipe, it helps support the dough’s structure and rise. By using bread flour combination with gluten-limiting ingredients such as butter, egg yolks, and sugar, we’re able to strike a balance and produce a loaf that’s both soft and has structure.

Proof Twice to Make It Extra Nice

Like many yeasted doughs, this cake requires two rises: a bulk fermentation and a final proof. The bulk fermentation, or first rise, happens in the mixing bowl, after the dough has been kneaded, with the final rise happening after the dough is filled and shaped.

Giving the cake enough time to proof is crucial to achieving its soft, light texture and allows the dough to develop more flavor. Under-proofing can lead to a dense crumb, as the yeast needs time to digest the sugars and produce the carbon dioxide so essential to the cake’s rise. To test if your dough is fully proofed, gently poke the cake with the tip of your finger. Your finger should leave an indent and the dough should gently spring back.

After the dough is shaped, it’s then covered and set to rise a second time. While it’s totally acceptable to let the cake rise on the counter until puffy and bake it on the same day, letting the cake rise overnight in the refrigerator helps the dough develop more flavor, and means you can enjoy a stress-free morning complete with a fresh, warm cake for breakfast.

When you’re ready to bake the cake, remove the cake from the fridge and let it finish rising at warm room temperature until it’s puffy, which will take one to two hours. Use the same poke test as before to tell if the dough is fully proofed. This time, you’re looking for the dough to very slowly spring back when pressed. It’s key not to let this dough rise too long at this stage or it could overproof and end up flat—you’ll know you’ve taken it too far if the dough begins to deflate when poked.

How to Fill and Form the Coffee Cake

Working with a soft dough can be a bit tricky. While you don’t want to incorporate too much flour while kneading, you should use enough flour when handling and forming the dough to prevent excessive stickiness. Remember that dough sticks to itself, so if your hands or rolling pin are covered in dough, things will only continue to get stickier—and messier. Generously dusting your work surface and rolling pin with flour will help prevent an endless cycle of sticking. And if you have excess flour remaining on the dough, just take a dry pastry brush and gently brush your dough to dust it off.

To form the cake, I roll the dough into a 9- by 16-inch-sized rectangle, scatter the cinnamon-pecan filling over the top, then roll the dough into a long log. Next, I coil the log around itself to make a circle that is then rolled out into a larger circle that will match the size of the cake pan—much like how a scallion pancake is formed. In my testing, I’ve found  this forming process to be the best way to incorporate swirls of the sweet filling evenly throughout the cake.

Before baking, I firmly press pecan halves into the surface of the dough. Be sure to cram as many as you can, as the nuts add a satisfying crunch to the otherwise pillowy cake. Brushing the cake with melted butter gives it a luscious sheen and helps keep the outside of the cake soft. Since the cake itself doesn’t contain a lot of sugar, a generous layer of vanilla glaze adds an extra layer of gooey sweetness and is literally the icing on the cake for this special breakfast treat.

Serve It Warm

Technically, you’re supposed to wait until yeasted breads and cakes are completely cooled before cutting into them. This allows all the starches to set and makes for the best texture. That said, this cake is truly best enjoyed while it’s still a bit warm. Don’t serve it straight from the oven, as the cake will have an unpleasant gummy texture when hot. Instead, let the cake cool for about 45 minutes before serving it.  This will ensure the cake is tender and fluffy, but still a bit gooey and warm.

For the Tangzhong:

In a small saucepan, whisk milk and flour to combine. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until mixture thickens to a stretchy pudding-like consistency, 2 to 3 minutes.

For the Dough:

Using a flexible spatula, scrape hot tangzhong into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment; let cool until just warm to the touch, about 10 minutes. Add cold milk to tangzhong, followed by the flour, butter, egg yolks, sugar, yeast, and salt. Mix on low speed until dough is smooth, supple, and elastic, 12 to 15 minutes. (The dough should pass the “windowpane” test: Pull off a golf-ball-sized piece of dough and, using two hands, stretch it as thin as you can without the dough ripping. If you can see through it, the dough is ready to rest. If not, continue kneading for another 2 to 4 minutes or until the dough passes this test.)

Loosely cover bowl with plastic wrap or a damp towel, and let sit at warm room temperature (75 to 80ºF; 24 to 27ºC) until nearly doubled in size, 60 to 90 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the filling:

In a small bowl, whisk brown sugar, flour, ground cinnamon, and salt to combine. Add pecans, followed by the melted butter, using your hands to toss and gently press until the mixture is sandy. Set aside.

Grease a 9-inch aluminum cake pan with nonstick spray. Line the pan with two 15-inch by 3-inch strips of parchment paper, overlapping them to form an “X” in the bottom of the pan. (There should be about 3 inches of overhang on the edges.)

When dough has risen, lightly flour top of dough and transfer to a lightly-floured work surface. Roll dough into a 9- by 16-inch rectangle. Scatter the filling evenly over the surface of the dough, and starting with the long end, roll the dough up as tightly as possible. Carefully pinch dough together along the seam to seal, and gently pat log to ensure even thickness; brush off any excess flour from the dough.

Gently coil dough around itself to create a circular shape. Cover with a clean, damp kitchen towel and let dough rest for 5 to 10 minutes to allow gluten to relax. Roll dough into a 9-inch wide circle about 3/4-inch thick, then transfer dough to prepared pan. Loosely cover with plastic wrap or damp kitchen towel and let rise at warm room temperature until dough appears slightly puffed, about 30 minutes. Tightly wrap cake pan with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 2 hours and up to 12.

When ready to bake, remove dough from refrigerator and let rise at warm room temperature until roughly doubled in size, dough is about 1 3/4-inches tall, and bounces back slowly when gently pressed, 1 to 2 hours.

To Bake:

Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat to 350ºF (175ºC).

Firmly press pecan halves into the surface of the dough, arranging them in a circular pattern around the dough. (Dough will deflate slightly—this is fine.)

Bake until light golden brown and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of the cake registers 190°F (88ºC), 20 to 25 minutes. Remove cake from oven and, using a pastry brush, immediately brush cake with melted butter. Lift the parchment to remove the cake from the pan and transfer it to a wire cooling rack. Let cool until slightly warm, 30 to 40 minutes.

In a medium bowl, whisk confectioners sugar, milk, vanilla extract, and salt until smooth. Glaze should be thick but pourable; if glaze seems too thick, whisk in milk, 1 teaspoon at a time, until glaze is the right consistency.

Using a spoon, drizzle glaze evenly over cake. Let set for 10 minutes before slicing with a serrated knife and serving.

Special Equipment

Whisk, flexible spatula, stand mixer with dough hook attachment, 9-inch aluminum cake pan, parchment paper, rolling pin, pastry brush

Make-Ahead and Storage

This cake is best enjoyed the day it’s made, but leftovers can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days or wrapped tightly in plastic wrap and frozen for up to 2 months. To thaw cake, let sit at room temperature overnight.

To reheat, loosely wrap cake in foil, and place in a 350ºF (175ºC) oven until warmed through, 5 to 10 minutes.