Nothin' Sour About It

Yesterday I went to a baby shower, for which the host requested that guests bring brunch food.  Instead of making breakfast cookies (What? That's a real thing.), I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out a traditional Sour Cream Coffee Cake.  Originally I was going to make this King Arthur Flour recipe, but then I remembered that the cookbook I'd recently acquired also had a sour cream coffee cake recipe. The two are actually quite similar, so I did some picking and choosing from each and came up with what I think was a lovely little immense cake. [Note: I will use the terms "coffee cake" and "crumb cake" interchangeably in this post, since I don't really know what the difference is.]

So it turns out that coffee cakes are a lot of work. And I definitely have a newfound respect for William Entenmann (real guy!) because he made a lot of crumb cakes back in the day. I also just learned from the Entenmann's website that his first bakery was in Brooklyn, NY. (Represent!)

Back to the cake. First, you need make the Crumb Topping (also known as the cinnamon streusel) and set that aside. In my opinion, a good crumb topping has lots of brown sugar, a little cinnamon, lots of butter, a tiny bit of salt -- and no nuts (not everything needs to have nuts in it!). So that's what I made: my ideal crumb topping.  It is, after all, the best part of the cake, isn't it? It should look something like this:

Mmm, crumbly goodness.

 I set aside the Crumb Topping in a covered bowl in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, I mixed together the Cinnamon Swirl. The Swirl will eventually end up in the middle of the cake. I used more brown sugar, cinnamon and a bit of cocoa powder. They say the cocoa powder is just for color and not for taste, but I swear just the knowledge there's a little chocolate in there somewhere makes it tastee better.

Cinnamon Swirl!

Here's where the heavy improvising comes in. The Baked recipe says to butter a 13x9 inch pan. Oh no, not MY clean shiny pan, thank you very much. Thank goodness for aluminum foil.

Clean... shiny...

Foiled Again!!

Anyhow, the next step of the recipe says to beat a ridiculous amount of butter until "smooth and ribbonlike." I think this is ribbonlike?

Add sugar, eggs, vanilla -- and then what really makes this cake delicious -- 16oz of sour cream.

Mix it all up and start layering: first, 1/3 of the batter goes on the bottom of the pan.

Then a layer of Cinnamon Swirl:

And then you repeat these two steps. It's easier said than done, mind you. Spreading this thick batter on a layer of crumbs is sort of frustrating: the crumbs stick to the batter, but the batter doesn't spread. It's kind of like trying to frost a cake made of sand, if you can imagine that? But, you do the best you can. On top of it all goes the Crumb Topping! And after it's all baked, it looks like this:

And on the inside:

See the swirl?

After I cut this into delicious, swirly, crumb-topped squares, and after I washed the many, many dishes dirtied in the baking process, I wrapped my gifts for the to-be-named Baby Boy, and set off for the baby shower. It was a lovely day!

 

Bonus Cookie

Since I actually made the coffee cake on Friday night, I also had time/energy to make a Sunday treat in the form of brownies. Yum!
Brownies are great because you only need one bowl. Hooray!

Certain baking product packages feature very good standard dessert recipes. I usually use the chocolate chip cookies recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, and the oatmeal-raisin cookie recipe on the lid of the oatmeal canister (with my own little tweaks here and there, of course). The same is true of the Baker's chocolate brownie recipe on the inside of the unsweetened chocolate box; this is my standby fudgy brownie recipe.

Here's an exciting adaptation - my mom got me this pan:

Certain people in my household really, really love corner brownies. A lot. To the point where they asked if they could keep the corners while I took the rest of the brownies to work with me.

I am hoping that this pan will not only make the brownies uniform in size and shape, but also bake them so each one has the texture of a corner piece. We shall see!

The brownie recipe tells you to melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave. But I still prefer the double-boiler method, because it's more fun (and you don't need a microwave-safe bowl). I only heat it until the butter is melted. If you keep stirring off the heat, the chocolate will melt.

Then add 2 cups of sugar.

Like a snowy January morning!

And three eggs (one at a time).

My eggs, by the way, are from happy chickens who are free to frolic where they will. They are cage-free organic chickens!

Voila! I'm pretty sure lining this pan with foil wouldn't work, since it's got a separate bottom that pops out. You'll see it later.

A woman I work with really wanted peanut butter brownies, but not everyone loved the PB. So in effort to please all of the people all of the time, I tried to make the half and half.

And in goes the grid.

Unfortunately, in spite of my spraying the grid with aerosol non-stick cooking spray within an inch of its life, it looks like the brownies stuck to the sides a bit -- especially the peanut butter side. But they are still quite tasty!
The cool part is that once you remove the grid, and put the pan on top of its lid, the bottom pushes up and brownie removal is so simple!

Time to eat!