coffee cake
June 3, 2008
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Ahh coffee cake: the most appropriate thing to bake up when the weather is hot and the night is knee-deep already. After dinner I was struck by the perverse plan to attempt such a cake—for the first time. But 10pm seems like the perfect time to begin any new project: especially one that involves heating a tiny kitchen for at least an hour' s time. As hot as Houston gets, my kitchen gets at least 20 degrees hotter when those burners ignite. It was something akin to Bikram baking.
But the result was well worth it—even though I couldn' t aptly complement my slice with drinkable coffee. It was midnight when the cake had finally cooled enough to ingest.
Baking this cake was everything baking is supposed to be: nuts, cinnamon, sugar and lots of sour cream. It began with a basic sour cream coffee cake recipe, and ended with a streusel topping I invented. The recipe told me to simply sprinkle nuts tossed with sugar and cinnamon on top of my beautiful creation, which I deemed a slightly limp approach to adorning so noble a dessert. So I added my own crown. But, since the online recipe called for the filling and the topper to be one in the same, I was left with an excess of cinnamon sugar walnuts. This was a problem easily addressed: hence my addition of a streusel and my surplus of filling.
What to do with that extra blend of cinnamon sugar and walnut? Make a coffee layer cake. Three levels of sour cream based dough interspersed with a dusting of cinnamon sugar and walnuts. Deep inside, I could feel my belly grin.
For the streusel topping, I put 2 tablespoons of butter, 2 tablespoons of flour and a teaspoon of cinnamon into a bowl, mixed until crumbly (but not smooth) and added nuts.
The topping I put onto the cake settled in its center, and created a glowing little puddle of butter. After about 30 minutes, I pulled the cake out of the oven and spooned the liquid over the drier sides of the cake, which had risen a bit higher. I repeated again after another five minutes had passed, and more butter had bubbled to the center.
This produced a nice crusty effect across the top of the cake, and especially in the crease of the pan where the butter settled. The center remained moist (I hate that word!) with a bit of crust forming as the sugar crystallized. There was also a proliferation of nuts and cinnamon in the center, as they had collected there from my rather ill-distributed streuddel-ing. I might have spread the topping over the cake more uniformly, but then again, I was quite pleased with the results. The butter puddle gave the cake a graceful curve. Plus spooning the liquid gave me many an excuse to open the oven and let the smell make the house feel like Christmas—in Hades.
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