Sour Cream Coffee Cake

This week I’ve baked a sour cream coffee cake.  Coffee cake does not actually have any coffee in it, but rather it is a cake that is often served and eaten with coffee.  This recipe comes from a different book from the Culinary Institute of America: The Culinary Institute of America Cookbook: A Collection of Our Favorite Recipes for the Home Chef.  This book, as you can see from the title, is unlike their other books in that it is targeted at the home kitchen.  It produces much smaller quantities and uses volume measurements for just about everything rather than weights.

Here is the mise en place for the coffee cake.  I’ve got too much butter out here, all you really need is 3/4ths of a cup.

This is the measured ingredients for the streusel filling.  Were I to make this cake again, I would make a second batch of this streusel, omitting the chocolate chips to use as a topping.  Also, if you like nuts, then some chopped nuts would go nicely in this streusel.

The streusel should get mixed and then set aside until later.

Then the dry ingredients also get mixed and set aside.

The wet ingredients, except the sugar and butter, go into a third bowl.

Then they get mixed and set aside.

The butter and sugar go into the stand mixer.

This was my issue with this recipe.  This is the fourth bowl I’ve had to use to make one coffee cake.  You could probably go without the bowl for the streusel and mix it in the bowl for the dry ingredients, but that still leaves you with three dirty bowls.

The butter and sugar get creamed together with the paddle attachment.  Then the dry and wet ingredients get mixed in, alternating them, a third at a time.

Then half the batter goes into the pan.  I’m using an angel food cake pan here, but a Bundt cake pan, a loaf pan, or any cake pan would do.

With half the batter in the pan, top it with the streusel mixture.  Then you can swirl it into the batter slightly with a wooden skewer, so that you don’t end up with just a flat layer of streusel in the final cake.

The streusel then gets topped with the other half of the cake batter. 

If you made streusel for topping the cake, you would put it on top the cake now.  Or depending on the cake pan, you may want to put it into the pan prior to adding any batter.

The coffee cake is done when it is golden brown on top and a skewer comes out clean.

After cooling for a while in the pan, it should be removed and moved to a wire rack to complete cooling.

And of course, here is a close up of the coffee cake, ready to be served.