I'm a sweets-for-breakfast guy. When I need grab-and-go food, these blueberry muffins are what I make. When I have time to wake up and bake, these buttermilk biscuits with jam hit the spot.
When I want to procrastinate a Thursday morning away, I make crumb cake, the old-school Jewish/German/New York kind with an avalanche of rocky shortbread crumbles on top. It's a totally reasonable thing to eat when you wake up that is also a cake.
I turn the volume up by amplifying the best part about the cake: the topping. I create boulder-sized crumbs, which are really what we all want.
And instead of a gentle perfume of spice, I pack the crumbs with spoonfuls of really good cinnamon that's been warmed in brown butter. My favorite cinnamon is the Vietnam-sourced Royal Cinnamon from Burlap & Barrel, a company that sells exceptional and responsibly sourced fair-trade spices.
To balance all the intensity up top, I leave the cake batter below relatively plain — a buttery yellow cake scented with vanilla.
The cake keeps for a week and it only gets better and better the further I get from the day I had to put in the work to bake it.
