When Christina and I were in Indiana for Christmas, Christina's mom Pat was raving about the coffee cakes she'd been sent from some family friend. She had always wanted the recipe, she said, but was happy to just be on the mailing list of annual coffee cake recipients.
It tasted like pretty standard coffee cake to me: yellow cake with a bit of cinnamon and brown sugar swirled in, and a brown sugar/butter/pecan topping. The smartass in me decided it would be fun to try to duplicate the formula based on some readily available recipes, and then send her one without explanation -- or a recipe. I'm a jerk that way.
Turns out the joke was on me -- building a cake from scratch can be a bitch when your tools aren't up to the task. Just try creaming a few sticks of butter with only a hand mixer. (I think I need to let the butter soften up a bit more, too. I don't use butter often, so it tends to stay in the freezer until I need it for a particular job.) I have a cheapo stand mixer I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond, but because the only storage space I have for it is up on a high closet shelf, I haven't even taken it out of the box.
Once I got things going, however, I was able to make a pretty good cake batter. Egg separators rule. Trouble was, the recipe I had was too large for the shallow square disposable cake baking tins I bought (it was part of the original coffee cake formula, so I thought it best not to stray too far). Of course, I only discovered this after I had poured it all in, put the topping on, and started baking it. The cake rose a bit too far and dumped some of the topping off the end of the pan and onto the oven floor. There, it quickly caught fire and I was forced to do a bit of emergency firefighting to keep the smoke from filling the house.
The cake eventually took twice as long to bake as the instructions maintained. It was also a bit too dense, but edible, once one got past the burned topping. Mmmmm. Carbonized pecans. I was assuming that the topping would naturally work its way down into the cake batter for that marblized effect, but that wasn't the case with this cake. Looks like I'll need to swirl it by hand. I'm also going to pour only half the batter into each tin -- that will allow for the cake to rise and I'll have two tries to get it right from that point.
I had a piece, Christina ate a few pieces, and the rest of it stayed on the top of the fridge until we tossed it out. I'll try again, eventually, but I think I'll find a place for the stand mixer to rest first.
It tasted like pretty standard coffee cake to me: yellow cake with a bit of cinnamon and brown sugar swirled in, and a brown sugar/butter/pecan topping. The smartass in me decided it would be fun to try to duplicate the formula based on some readily available recipes, and then send her one without explanation -- or a recipe. I'm a jerk that way.
Turns out the joke was on me -- building a cake from scratch can be a bitch when your tools aren't up to the task. Just try creaming a few sticks of butter with only a hand mixer. (I think I need to let the butter soften up a bit more, too. I don't use butter often, so it tends to stay in the freezer until I need it for a particular job.) I have a cheapo stand mixer I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond, but because the only storage space I have for it is up on a high closet shelf, I haven't even taken it out of the box.
Once I got things going, however, I was able to make a pretty good cake batter. Egg separators rule. Trouble was, the recipe I had was too large for the shallow square disposable cake baking tins I bought (it was part of the original coffee cake formula, so I thought it best not to stray too far). Of course, I only discovered this after I had poured it all in, put the topping on, and started baking it. The cake rose a bit too far and dumped some of the topping off the end of the pan and onto the oven floor. There, it quickly caught fire and I was forced to do a bit of emergency firefighting to keep the smoke from filling the house.
The cake eventually took twice as long to bake as the instructions maintained. It was also a bit too dense, but edible, once one got past the burned topping. Mmmmm. Carbonized pecans. I was assuming that the topping would naturally work its way down into the cake batter for that marblized effect, but that wasn't the case with this cake. Looks like I'll need to swirl it by hand. I'm also going to pour only half the batter into each tin -- that will allow for the cake to rise and I'll have two tries to get it right from that point.
I had a piece, Christina ate a few pieces, and the rest of it stayed on the top of the fridge until we tossed it out. I'll try again, eventually, but I think I'll find a place for the stand mixer to rest first.
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