Fresh Peach Crumb Cake with Vanilla Glaze

The person who invented crumb cake? Kind of a genius.

He or she figured out a way to make it acceptable to eat cake for breakfast AND, should it please you, enjoy a second piece of that same cake with afternoon coffee. Only in that case, would the cake be considered coffee cake instead of crumb cake? Is there really a difference between the two? Hang on a sec---I'm going to go check with Wikipedia.....

OK, so I found the coffee cake listing, but there was no exact listing for "crumb cake." I was instead redirected to the listing for "streuselkuchen", essentially the German translation of crumb cake (according to Wikipedia, at least.) From what I can tell per my extensive research, a crumb cake is always a coffee cake, but a coffee cake is not always a crumb cake.

Personally, I prefer for my coffee cake to always be a crumb cake because I am nuts about streusel (especially a nutty streusel.) When my mom used to bring home an occasional box of Entenmann's from the grocery store, I always hoped that the box contained their New York Style Crumb Cake, meaning that in the very near future I would be happily picking the sweet and buttery clumps of streusel off the top. If it wasn't the crumb cake, I'd hope for the Crumb Donuts, ingeniously combining a crumb cake topping and a glazed donut (a.k.a. the cronut of the 80s.)

In the same way that mountain of glazed streusel can make a crumb cake, a dry cake layer can break it. How on earth are you supposed to have a productive day when your morning sweet disappoints? You deserve better than that, so here's my solution:

Having tried several variations on crumb and coffee cake recipes over the years, I've found that moistest cake layers result when I use sour cream in the ingredients. Not fat free sour cream. Not even the light stuff. I'm talking about the real-deal-kind-our-grandmothers-used sour cream.

Also, don't over-bake your crumb cake. No amount of sour cream can save an over-baked cake from dry-as-a-desert status.

Not only does this crumb cake check all the boxes by being both moist and streuseled (I know, not a word), but it goes the extra two miles by having a layer of fresh, juicy peaches and a sweet vanilla glaze, making it the latest addition to my series of peachy posts. Now, I'm usually pretty good about the whole will power thing when I bake, but in this case I was having the toughest time resisting just a little slice here and a little slice there. I had to send it into work with Eric, or the entire thing would have been devoured the second I was left alone with it.