Alpha Bakers -- Coffee Crumb Cake Muffins

 

When is a muffin a cupcake? When is a cake breakfast? These are existential dilemmas that expand beyond the range of your average Saturday morning blog post, and are thus out of my purview, but let it be known that when you put coffee cake in muffin tins and slip in a bit of apple, you have successfully effected the transformation to muffin. Here they are! They were delicious. 

Alpha Bakers -- Blueberry Sour Cream Crumb Coffeecake

Keep your towering buttercream fortresses. I'll take a crumb cake loaded with fruit and buttery streusel any day. This is coffeecake in the best style, perfect for all-day eating. A soft sour cream butter cake, threaded through with a sugary nutty streusel, then topped with blueberries and crumbs. This is all that's needed to gain entry to the clubbiest Kaffeeklastch.

My colleagues...well let's just say they agreed. I was glad I'd had a square for breakfast, because by the time my coffee break arrived, it was no more. I followed the recipe fairly faithfully, only substituting almonds for walnuts in the streusel.

"...we hope this doesn't ruin your life..."

Last week, we caused our downstairs neighbors some inconvenience (I won't go into it, but let's just say there was some water coming through their ceiling), and I baked them a bundt cake to make amends. They weren't home when I went to drop it off, so I left the covered plate outside their door.

The next evening we went up to visit our upstairs neighbors. This makes our building sound absurdly cozy. The truth is, that while there are only five apartments, and we're friendly all around, we don't socialize all that much. Still, we have a lot in common with the folks upstairs, and when we do see them, even for a short stairway conversation, I always think that we should spend more time hanging out.

Back to the story at hand--we went up to see the upstairs neighbors. The conversation turned to the water incident, and Clarence, who also has a food blog and loves to cook, said, "Oh, is that why there was a cake in the hallway?" I admitted my complicity, and he mentioned that any cakes that came their way would also be welcomed.

Now, it doesn't take a special occasion to get a cake out of me, but I knew they'd be getting a cake immediately when he followed up his cake observations by saying they had something to tell us...

"Now," he said, "we hope this doesn't ruin your life...but we're going to have a baby."

We assured him that we couldn't imagine it ruining our lives (we like little people, and are already up at all hours). In fact, if they let me put a funny hat on their kid, it may well enhance my life immensely. They laughed, and said they had heard that it might ruin their lives, but they would take advantage of Matt's 3AM ukulele solos as lullaby fodder.

With all this good news and running up and down the stairs, it was clearly time to make them a cake. I chose one of the last contenders in the Rose's Heavenly Cake countdown, an Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake.  It's a simple but appealing sweet, two layers of sour cream coffeecake, sandwiched around a thin apple cinnamon filling, and covered with buttery walnut streusel.

Two unrelated notes: my spellcheck doesn't recognise coffeecake or streusel. Or spellcheck. It has a lot to learn. Also, I am really over people using 'buttery' to describe rich tuna belly or other sashimi. Maybe I just don't like sashimi. At any rate, Clarence assures us that the cake was excellent.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Cinnamon Espresso Squares

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie assignment was Cinnamon Squares, a plain, buttery, almost coffeecake-like cake, with a ribbon of cinnamon, espresso, and chocolate. I wasn't all that excited about it, partly because the picture in the book looks dry, but it was very alluring, especially when warm. Dorie pairs it with a chocolate icing, but I liked it unadorned.

I'm watching the end of Milos Forman's Hair as I type this, and wish I had something more revolutionary to add, but this is pretty basic bake sale stuff. In the sharing bake sale spirit, you can find the recipe here.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Blackberry Crumb Cake

Some weeks, the Blueberry Crumb Cake from Baking would have been a no-brainer. Nuts, crumble, berries...This week, though, I really had to work up to it, and never made it all the way to really enthused, good as it was. First, you see, I'm always a little suspicious of coffeecake--too much butter for too little reward? Why not just skip the cake part, put the berries under the topping, and call it crisp? Or even 'krisp,' as the Moosewood Cookbook insists.

So yes, coffeecake lovers, I'm that girl. The girl who would dare to skip the cake part. But for all of you out there, I didn't. I made it like Dorie said. And it was very good.
First I spun butter and nuts and flour and spice in the blender to become a streusel topping.
Then I tossed frozen blackberries in some flour.A half recipe fit very neatly into my usual custard pan, a little blue oval number from Ikea. I didn't refrigerate the crumbs, nor work all that quickly, so by the time I got to them the crumbs were less crumby than mushy, which may have changed the texture of the topping, but it still made a different layer in taste and texture, and worked well. The berry/cake ratio was more or less as Dorie recommended, but blackberries are messier things than blueberries, so there was more mixing, and the final batter was pleasingly purple.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Dimply Plum Cake

Over the years, I've gotten pretty good at basic kitchen chemistry. Although I still can't remember whether fudgier brownies means more eggs or less, or anything that requires specific memorization, I'm getting pretty good at substitutions. I more or less know what effect new ingredients will have on a recipe, and I have a good sense of what will work and what will be a disaster. I can gauge batter texture and tell when it needs more liquid. This confidence can sometimes be overconfidence when I'm not paying attention, or when I have a persistent block against remembering the properties of an ingredient.

In this case, my nemesis is a truth that should be easy to remember after all my bread adventures: Whole wheat flour is more absorbent than white. It eats moisture, andwhen one substitutes it for 1/3 of the flour in a recipe, it's a good idea to add some more. This is what I did not do, and this is why my Dimply Plum Cake (actually made with peaches) was kind of terrible. About ten minutes into the baking, I realized what was going on, and poured a little milk over the top. This saved the top, but the bottom is still more biscuit-like than anything else, and the whole thing is kind of unappetizing. This is why I usually try to make a recipe as directed once before I muck around, but scarcity of ingredients made that tough last night. Maybe I'll make it again, but, to be honest, I got a sense of what it might be like and I think I'd prefer to put my fruit into the Yogurt Cake. Haven't made one of those in a while, actually. Hmm....