Cake #8: Argroves Manor Coffee Cake

Remember back on 2/28 when I made The Barefoot Contessa's Sour Cream Coffee Cake? I made a double streusel recipe because I looked ahead and noticed that the next recipe in the book called for the same streusel. I was expecting to make the next coffee cake within a week or two. Then March and April happened and turned out to be some of the busiest weeks I've had in a long time. Busy as in: Something planned every single night after work! Easter, the German Chocolate cake butting in, and finally, April 25th (almost 2 MONTHS later) I got around to the next cake. Guess what? The streusel was still fine. Moral of the story- make some streusel ahead of time and refrigerate it. It will make the cake-making process that much easier.
I decided (after the POUND of butter the German Chocolate cake called for) to do this cake with applesauce instead of butter, and it turned out great! And healthy! Woo-hoo! Don't worry, health-phobes, that streusel has a good solid 3 T (3/8 stick) of butter in it.
First, you make stewed fruit by mixing sugar and water. I used raw sugar because I do that sort of thing, which might be the reason it took forever to get thick. (In case you're wondering, forever is much longer than the 20 minutes the book said it would take.) Add blueberries and a peeled, chopped apple to the sugar water.

Above: stewed fruit- in motion!

The cake calls for (applesauce), sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, salt and 1 cup of vanilla yogurt. I used Brown Cow yogurt with the cream on top. The stuff is thick and tasty and again, for the the health-phobes, NOT non or even low-fat. Is health-phobes even a word, or did I invent it just now? Am I going to go down in history as the inventor of the term health-phobe? Wouldn't that be something.

The book says something confusing: add 1 cup of the dry ingredients, followed by 1/2 of the flour mixture. Unless I'm missing something, I'm pretty sure the flour mixture is the dry ingredients. That got an arrow and a question mark on the page from me.
So, now you've got your stewed fruit, streusel and cake batter. Pour half the batter into the tube pan, then all the fruit, then some of the streusel, then the rest of the batter and the rest of the streusel on top.

Above: The top of the cake.
Above: The bottom of the cake.

Next time, I would put about 3/4 of the batter in first- the stewed fruit seemed to fall to the bottom, maybe because it was heavier than the batter or it wasn't thick and syrupy enough. It seemed to be more of a bottom layer than a middle layer when I ate it. Anyway, this cake is really good and, um, great with coffee! Imagine that!