Cake #6: The Barefoot Contessa’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake

On February 28, I made my first coffee cake. It was a disaster. But not entirely. Here’s the story.

I decided to make 2 cakes, one with butter, the other with applesauce. Because I found that subbing applesauce for butter doesn’t work too well in pound cakes, I thought I would attempt that experiment again on coffee cakes. And I had a pot luck to go to, so I didn’t cut any cake recipes in half, Hence, the disaster. I did learn a valuable lesson though. Are you intrigued to read on?

The butter version was first. I creamed the butter and sugar a lot. Then I added eggs and a mixture of the dry ingredients. Meanwhile, I made the “streusel” and learned that “streusel” is a German word that refers to a crumb topping made of butter, flour and sugar, sometimes combined with spices and chopped nuts. It made me think of those frozen toaster streudels I ate when I was a kid, but this is totally different. No frosting out of a plastic bag to squeeze onto the toasted pop tart.

The streusel called for flour, cinnamon, salt, butter, chopped walnuts and light brown sugar. I just happened to go to the little Amish town of Kalona the day before and having scratched my head over the difference between light brown sugar and dark brown sugar that this book calls for, I found both in bulk at the amazing Stringtown Grocery! Now I have 2 kinds of brown sugar, 3 kinds of white sugar, and so many kinds of flour I can’t count them anymore. Including cake flour! Which I bought just for this recipe! Also I have 3 different types of table salt. I’m becoming a kitchen snob. Or maybe an expert. I’m not sure which.

I mixed up the streusel (which, I’ve just learned, is a difficult word to type. Streusel. Try it.) by hand, squeezing all the little chunks of cold butter and mushing it up until it looked satisfyingly like a crumb texture. I made a double batch and just split it between the two cakes. Then I poured the thick batter into the bundt pan (half of it), added ¾ cup of the streusel, added the rest of the batter, and topped it with the streusel.

I then made the applesauce version and did the same, only using the (much smaller) tube pan. I discovered that I had more batter than the pan would hold, so I filled it up and then put the remaining batter with a little streusel in a small ceramic bowl.

This is where the disaster comes in. Apparently you can’t fill the tube pan to the brim with some cakes (Melissa does mention this in her book, I just didn’t listen). This is the type of cake that rises a little, even though it’s a coffee cake and you wouldn’t expect it to. So- the cake pretty much spent an hour oozing over the sides of the pan and onto the bottom of the oven, until the entire house was filled with smoke and we had the doors open and the fan going. In February. In Iowa.

But both cakes turned out to be edible- I just had to let the applesauce cake’s pan soak in hot soapy water for 2 days. I took the butter version to a potluck in which half of the food was dessert. I learned two things.

1. Don’t take a coffee cake to a pot luck where there are lots of other desserts containing lots of attractive looking chocolate.
2. If you do take a coffee cake to a pot luck, do not give it a title with “sour cream”. Even though you know it’s a key ingredient, to those who don’t make a lot of cake, the words “sour cream” and “coffee cake” do not sound appetizing together.

If you want to show up at a potluck with a dish and take most of it home with you, so that you can take it to work the next day and be a hero among your co-workers, then ignore those 2 rules and go for it!

You can also substitute yogurt, or flavored yogurt for the sour cream, but I still wouldn’t include it in the title. I would just call this a Walnut Coffee Cake and tell people about the sour cream only if they ask.

The result of my experiment: I really liked the applesauce version! It has a much different texture than the butter version, and it seems to have more flavor. I think coffee cakes are definitely going to be made with applesauce in my house, especially if I am planning on making them to eat at breakfast (with my coffee). If I ever get crazy enough to do that sort of thing. This particular cake, even if I had made just one, took for freakin’ ever!

Oh, it also called for a glaze of confectioners’ sugar and real maple syrup. I have both of those ingredients, and I’m curious how it would taste, but I never did get around to making it. The cake was good without it and you really can only spend so much time in a smoky kitchen.