My mom has been making this coffee cake since I was little, and I swear it's the best coffee cake I've ever had. Many of the people that I've made it for agree. So, give it a try! It's a little labor intensive, but it's worth it.
Cake ingredients1 C sugar
1/2 C butter
2 eggs
1 C sour cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 C flour
2 C fruit (any berry, sliced apples)
Topping ingredients1 C packed brown sugar
1/2 C flour
1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice, ground allspice or ground cloves
In a mixer, cream together the butter and sugar. Add eggs, vanilla and sour cream. Mix well. In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and baking powder. Add the dry mix to the wet mix and mix well. Set this aside.
In a separate bowl, combine all topping ingredients except butter. Cut the butter into small pieces (about 1Tbsp each) and then cut into the mix with a pastry blender until small bits of butter are covered with the mixture.
Grease a 9/13 cake pan with the empty butter wrapper. Spread just enough of the batter in the pan to roughly cover the bottom. Top with 1/2 of the topping mix and all of the fruit.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Drop globs of the rest of the batter evenly on top of the fruit. Once all of the blobs are on, spread them with a spatula - connecting them as much as you can (see picture below pre and post spreading). This will go well or not depending on how hot it is out and the type of fruit you've used.
Cover with the rest of the topping. Bake on 350 degrees for at least 55 minutes (mine has been taking 60 minutes). You can refrigerate the unbaked coffee cake overnight and bake in the morning if you'd like (breakfast dates and office mates are doubly impressed when the coffee cake is still warm), but you will need to add a few minutes to the baking time. Test with a knife in the middle of the coffee cake - it's done when it comes out clean. A toothpick is not enough.
Enjoy!
This is a baby boy blanket that took me forever only because I procrastinated because I'd never tied a blanket before. However, once I got down to it, it was easy peasy. The pattern suggests using small satin stitches instead of ties, but I couldn't figure out how to make my sewing machine do that. By the way, this pattern has an error in the book - the order of the fabric layers are wrong. Comment with your email address if you want me to send you the correct order.
This is what I call my six year sweater. It was probably my 5th knitting project, before I knew that knitting patterns regularly contain errors. Why don't they hire editors??? Anyway, I knit about 2/3 of the project before I realized that the pieces weren't going to go together properly. So, I put it in a bag and stashed it away for a few years. Once I got back into knitting and realized that one is supposed to download pattern corrections from the internet, I took the sweater to my next open knitting class, got some expert help and fixed it all up! Six years later, a lovely little baby sweater for a friend's new baby boy. Here's to never giving up!
