If you have an abundance of grapes this season, delight your kids with back-to-school grape coffee cake recipe with crumble topping. Any color grape you have – green, purple, red – will work since this is the absolute best coffee cake recipe, with an even better 2-part crumble topping. Plus, at the end please leave us a comment with your own favorite back to school traditions – I’m making a list!
If you’ve got hungry kids this back-to-school season, throw this grape coffee cake recipe together and fill their tummies with goodness. This recipe was inspired by one of my favorite books, The Tasha Tudor Cookbook. Yes, Tudor fans – she has a cookbook.
- We highlighted another of her recipes here – Warm Cheese Souffle. Ah, that one’s a keeper.
- Oh, here’s another one inspired by her – our family’s holiday tradition of a Sweet Bread Christmas Tea Ring.
Grow Your Own Grapes
If you’re a gardener, grapes have a lot to recommend them as a backyard fruit. A fruit tree can take more than five years to fruit after it’s been planted. Most grapes vines will fruit inside three years after planting. Sweet!
- One of my favorite varieties to grow is Concord and you can read about their virtues here.
- If you do consider growing them, here are some good mulch ideas from Reformation Acres specifically for grapes.
Growing grapes is a good project for homestead kids because grapes are simple to maintain, but do require some work. They’re a good challenge in the garden, if you’re looking for a homestead kid project – especially if you home educate.
Plus, the best part for kids, grapes are really fun to harvest. A quick twist and whole bunches pop off into the basket. Inevitably, some fall into your mouth while you work, too.
Grape Coffee Cake Recipe with Crumble Topping
Cooking with grapes is as easy as cooking with berries so don’t over-think this recipe. Any color grape will work well, though I prefer sun-ripened green or purple (like concords).
If you’re using store bought grapes, use red or purple grapes since most green grapes from the store really aren’t ever ripe enough.
Grape Coffee Cake with Crumble Topping
Ingredients
For Grape Coffee Cake
- 1/2 Cup Raw sugar, or any granulated sugar
- 1/2 Cup Butter
- 2 Eggs at room temperature
- 2 Cups Fresh whole milk
- 4-5 Cups Fresh ground flour, Einkorn is preferred
- 1 1/2 tsp Sea salt
- 1 tbsp. Baking powder
- 2-3 Cups Grapes - red, purple, or green
For 1st Topping*
- 3/4 Cup Raw sugar
- 1 Cup Flour
- 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp Nutmeg
- Pinch Sea salt
- 1/2 Cup Butter, room temperature and very spreadable
For 2nd Crumble Topping*
- 3/4 Cup Coconut sugar
- 1 Cup Flour
- 1/2 Cup Butter, cold cut in 1 Tbsp amounts
Instructions
Mixing Coffee Cake
- Preheat oven to 375F/191C.
- Cream together the butter and sugar.
- In a separate bowl sift together dry ingredients. In another bowl slight beat the eggs into the milk.
- Alternating the dry ingredients and the milk mixture, combine all ingredients with the creamed butter. Mix well after each addition.
- Gently fold in the grapes. If your grapes are smaller, use three cups. If your grapes are some of the larger kind, use two cups. It's your coffee cake, though, you add as many grapes as you want!
- Generously utter a 9 x 13 glass baking pan. Pour batter into pan.
*Mixing and Placing the Toppings
- For the first topping, mix all ingredients together in a bowl until completely incorporated. You will end up with something that looks like a granular frosting. It's important that the butter be room temperature for this.
- Spread this "frosting" over the top of the coffee cake batter as evenly as you can. This adds a delectable sugary layer to this tart grape coffee cake.
- For the second topping, mix all the ingredients and cut together with a pastry cutter or two knives. Sprinkle over the top of your coffee cake. This topping can be doubled.
- If you'd rather eat your own head than go to the trouble of making TWO toppings this morning, no worries. Just double or even triple the second topping recipe and sprinkle it on top.
To Bake the Coffee Cake
- Place into a hot oven and cook for about forty minutes.
- Cover with foil for the last 15-20 minutes to prevent scorching of the sugary topping. Know your oven and test the cake for done-ness periodically. This is a dense cake so it will take some time to bake, but don't let it burn.
- Let rest for five minutes. Serve hot with butter or send along cold in a school lunch as a treat.
Grape Coffee Cake for Dessert
This recipe can be turned into dessert by adding a few extra grapes, a pinch more sugar, extra crumble topping, and baking it in a round dish to add some elegance.
Back to School Traditions
Since we home educate, the beginning of our school year is sort of fuzzy – we don’t really have a firm stop date and we don’t really have a firm start date. Every day is school! However, once our groups and outside classes start in September, I like to do a few special things to give us a “back-to-school” feeling. Here are a few things we do:
- Make this grape coffee cake recipe OR cinnamon rolls – it depends on how the before goes, honestly.
- I set the breakfast table with our good plates and put out all of the school supplies I’ve gathered. There’s something so exciting for this nerdy mom to set out all the pencils, paper, pens and glitter glue we’ll need for countless projects throughout the coming year. I love learning with my kids!
- Everyone gets to spend the day in their jammies if they want to, just because we can.
- When we lived in the city, we would also go to a museum or the zoo or someplace usually jam packed with people during the summer. With all the publicly educated kids back in school, these places are a lot emptier. For this outing, everyone MUST put town clothes on, but jammies can be reapplied after we get home.
What Readers are Saying
Here are few more back to school traditions from our readers:
Jaime, also a home educator, shared this:
“We don’t ever finish school, but every year, either in June or end of August, we do Ice Cream Dinner to celebrate our school year. All ice cream. We usually invite a tonne of people, have them bring toppings, and call it a party. My boys love it. This is going on 12 years now, and we never miss the chance.”
Jess, mom to lots of fabulous girls, share:
“We do a “back to school tea party”. We make fancy finger foods and break out the fancy china. I started it when McKenzie went to preschool and they have asked for it every year since. We discuss our goals for the year and something that we want to do better at home. It’s a lot of prep but so worth it!”
Allison shared a memory from her childhood:
“Dad gave each kid a father’s blessing. Mom filled the freezer with grab-able snacks (homemade cookies usually) to go with the sandwich and fruit cup. Everyone did their homework together, helping the slowpoke until they were done.”
For more homestead traditions and fun, grab your copy of Homestead Holidays!
Grape Recipes
If you STILL have grapes leftover from the harvest, I suggest you try these other great grape recipes:
Grape Recipes
Instant Pot Grape Juice Recipe
This is our very favorite grape juice recipe and it's made with Concord grapes, or any Concord type like Saturn or Sunbelt. You can also make this recipe with green or red grapes. The more ripe and fresh the grapes are, the more juice you'll get through processing and the better the flavor will be.
I could not understand recipe: In Instructions: Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time till fluffy
In separate bowl sift together dry ingreds. In another bowl slight beat the eggs into the milk. WHAT EGGS? THERE ARE ONLY TWO EGGS IN THE RECIPE AND THEY ARE ALREADY ADDED ONE AT A TIME INTO THE BUTTER AND SUGAR
Thanks so much for pointing that out, Delene! It looks like I was probably writing up two recipes at one time – my eyes probably crossed. I hope it’s clear now.
Thank you for taking the time let me know – it was so helpful!
Also… found the recipe to be rather odd…
no leavening at all? no salt. no vanilla…. I’m not going to save this recipe..
I’m sorry you didn’t find the recipe to your liking – it really is quite tasty! Should you change your mind, and for your information, the recipe calls for both baking powder and salt. No vanilla, though – it would get lost in the other flavors. Although, you could certainly add a teaspoon or two and see how you like the flavor!
what is you advise on dealing with grapes that have seeds?
Good question! Some seeds are so small you can simply leave them and let them add crunch like buckwheat or chia seeds. For big seeds, I would suggest putting the grapes and the milk into a blender and blend them very well. Pour the resulting liquid into a nut milk bag (or through fine cheesecloth, or a fine mesh sieve) to strain out the seed parts. Use the milk in the recipe as called for. It will change the texture and color of the finished cake a bit, but should work well.
I like biting into the grapes here and there in the cake and, if you do too, you can reserve a handful of grapes to slice in half and manually de-seed. These you can add to the cake as you mix it before baking.
Let me know if I can help in any other way! If you have time, let me know how it turns out for you.
If anyone trys this with gf flour you need to adjust for the liquid and add more flour. Otherwise you get a sugary gummy mess.
Thank you for that great tip!
Does it have to be fresh flour? Or can I just use the all purpose or bread flour at home? I know nothing of baking…
Yes! You can use whatever flour you have and it will work great. Freshly ground flour just has a little more flavor and nutrition. Let me know if you need anything else and how the recipe works for you. Good luck!
This looks nothing like the picture. In fact, it makes me think this picture is not this recipe. It doesn’t resemble a cake at all. More like solid block of milk almost. I could barely taste the grapes (I used a little over 5 cups). May be because I blended the grapes with the milk as suggested. The topping was delicious. I used brown sugar instead of coconut sugar. This was a very expensive disaster. Again, I don’t think the picture shows this recipe (directions say 9×13; picture is a round cake). Bummer.
So sorry you didn’t care for it. There are a lot of recipes online for coffee cake, so I’m confident you’ll find one you do like. Although, it sounds a bit like you misread the recipe. The eggs are blended into the milk, not the grapes. The grapes are folded in at the end.
If you were using store bought grapes, it often happens that they’re not picked at the peak of ripeness. They’re often even picked “green” or unripe to ensure they’ll stay firm for shipping. It’s a sad reality of store-bought produce. Which is why I included the section about growing your own grapes. Grapes come into production so much quicker than fruit trees and you enjoy the benefit of ripe fruit in your own backyard!
The picture is one variation – that one in a round pan with purple grapes – that I will often serve for dessert instead of breakfast. 9 x 13 is a more common pan to have, though, so I used those measurements for the recipe. The purple grapes do produce a slightly different flavor than green grapes but the resulting cake should be the same otherwise.
Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to leave a comment – have a great week!