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New York-Style Crumb Cake Muffins Recipe - America's Test Kitchen
Don't be tempted to substitute all-purpose flour for the cake flour, as doing so will make a dry, tough muffin. If you can't
find buttermilk, you can substitute an equal amount of plain, low-fat yogurt. When topping the muffins, take care to not
push the crumbs into the batter. Cooled leftovers can be wrapped in plastic wrap and stored at room temperature for up
to 2 days.
New York-Style Crumb Cake Muffins
Makes 12 muffins
The popular supermarket version of crumb cake doesn't do justice to the bakery-fresh original; it's laden with shelf-stabilizing preservatives, and the cake has a streusel rather than crumb topping.
An authentic crumb cake should have rich dough topped with thick chunks of lightly spiced crumb topping.
We tweaked our favorite yellow cake recipe to make it a little less rich to compensate for the buttery crumb topping. Adding buttermilk restored the moisture we removed and limiting the final egg to just a yolk kept the cake from being too rubbery. For the topping, we first needed to define the difference between a streusel and crumb topping. We decided that a proper crumb topping was softer, more cookie-like, and contained only cinnamon as a flavoring. We substituted brown sugar for half the granulated sugar and switched from softened butter to melted butter to give the raw topping a unified, dough-like consistency. For the right texture, we broke the dough apart into little nuggets that we sprinkled over the cake batter. The nuggets held together when baked, giving us sturdy crumbs that remained moist and tender on the inside.
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