It won't cure coronavirus, but LAUSD sweetens your life with the recipe for its famous coffee cake

It’s 2020, and coronavirus has shut down most of the country and the world. Los Angeles Unified School District campuses have been closed for weeks.

Schools are trying to stay relevant and keep students engaged with online lessons. LAUSD doesn’t want parents to forget about them either. With three robocalls a night, how could we? Nobody does robocalls like the LAUSD.

Without actual school, children — and teachers, no doubt — can’t enjoy the LAUSD’s famous coffee cake. I remember it, too.

Like the colonel’s original “11 herbs and spices” Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe, which is kept in a vault, the LAUSD’s legendary coffee cake recipe must be similarly well-guarded.

I will forget that local newspapers, in response to reader requests, used to run this on the regular. The equally legendary Natalie Haughton of the LA Daily News Food Section must have run this a couple of dozen times when I was a copy editor in the Features department.

The original recipe from 1954 looks like it was printed on a mimeograph machine. Remember mimeographs? The color, which was purple. The smell.

Here’s the tweet, which is indeed burning up the internet:

Baking more now that you are staying home? Remember the legendary LAUSD Old Fashioned Coffee Cake? Here is the original recipe from 1954. Photo credit: Danielle Chiriguaya. pic.twitter.com/xpzN48JeXZ

— Los Angeles Unified (@LASchools) April 7, 2020