55. Sour Cream Coffeecake

Date Cooked: January 16, 2009
Page: 838
Rating: A-

I’m woefully behind on posting what I have been cooking so I had better start catching up with some blog posts. The decision for the Sour Cream Coffeecake was simple. I pretty much had all the ingredients and had yet to cook from the Cakes chapter of the Book. So this looked really simple… and I love coffeecake. I originally had intentions of making this a chocolate chip sour cream coffeecake but due to some confusion during the layering of the cake I had completely forgotten that I intended to do that. More on that ridiculous moment shortly.

Since I am not a strong baker I started by getting all of my ingredients out and measured. Then I began to put together the streusel. A base streusel gets made of sugar, flour and cinnamon and then to some of that gets added butter and chopped nuts. The streusel on the cake used the butter and nuts. Once this was done and set aside I began on the batter.

The batter was a straight-forward affair with the usual assortment of cake ingredients with the exception of using the sour cream. Mixing this went smoothly and once done it was time to layer in my greased tube pan.

First in is 2 cups of batter (this works out to about a third but I didn’t notice at first), then a layer of the base streusel, then this is where everything went down the crapper. Had I remember to use the measured out chocolate chips they should have gone just before the streusel, but I was struggling to understand the directions. For some reason I completely missed the portion that told me to put a second layer of batter topped with more streusel before using the rest of the batter. I just skipped to using the rest of the batter. You can see in the picture that there is only one sweet line of sugary goodness and it is close to the bottom. Sure would have been nice to have seen a second line of tasty sweet sugar in there. This of course left me confused as to why I had so much streusel left over until I noticed the error. I probably should not have sampled so much of the streusel while working on this cake. I was probably suffering through a sugar high.

Nevertheless I sent it to bask in the heat of the oven. It took a little longer to bake than the book suggested but my pan is dark and a little on the thick side so it probably slowed the baking process. Once removed and cooled came the most harrowing moment of the ordeal. Flipping it out of the pan. I envisioned the cake sticking while the streusel topping broke and scattered everywhere. Didn’t happen that way. The first flip out of the pan went perfect. The second flip right-side up left bits of streusel topping all over my kitchen, but the majority of the topping remained intact.

Rating: A-. Putting the layering issue aside and the topping being a bit crumblier than I would have liked the flavor and texture of the cake was amazing! It was moist and not overly sweet until you hit the streusel layer. The extra layer of streusel would have been nice but wasn’t really missed. I will be making this again… next time hopefully with chocolate chips.