Sunday, August 7, 2011

Long Wait For Breakfast

I got up at a reasonable hour and decided I could treat myself to a coffee cake for breakfast. I found a recipe in Cooking Light for "Sour Cream Coffee Cake". I had all the ingredients without having to run to the store so it was the perfect candidate.

First thing I had to do was toast oatmeal. I have never toasted oatmeal before. Into the oven it went while I assembled the rest of the ingredients. This has all the things you would expect; flour, baking soda, baking powder, eggs, cinnamon, sour cream and vanilla, as well as oatmeal and walnuts and whole wheat flour.

Once the oatmeal was toasted, I was going to have to pulverize 1/2 cup of it which meant I had to get out the food processor. Yes, I have one. I keep it behind the microwave which sounds odd except that my counter is an "L" shape. The microwave sits diagonally at the corner of the "L" and the food processor fits neatly behind it.

My dad bought this to give you an idea of its age. I use it about once every couple of years. I dumped in the oatmeal and attempted to turn it on. Nothing. I thought, perhaps, it had finally decided it wasn't going to work any more. But, a twist of the container and it latched properly which then allowed the processor to work.

It took awhile to make this. Toast, process, mix dry, mix with a mixer the wet, incorporate alternately with the sour cream and spread into pan. It didn't help matters that we had a heavy thunderstorm come through and I had to dash outside to put the windows on the Jeep and we lost power 3 times. Com Ed talks about how it needs this "smart grid" technology to isolate outages quicker. No, what we need is a reliable delivery system. If the delivery system is constantly going out, smart grids aren't going to get it working faster.

So, it probably took me longer to mix the ingredients and get them in a buttered springform pan. I had to remember where I put that. Here is the cake ready for baking. It has a streusel topping of toasted oatmeal, walnuts and butter. Pop in the oven and go take a shower.

In 35 minutes, it was done. My house smelled wonderful. This is the baked cake.

But how does it taste?

Every bit as good as you can imagine. Actually, confession time. I was putting away the baking soda and etc, when I found the cinnamon, which was to go into the streusel topping and the vanilla, which was to go into the batter. In the crush of things on my small counter, I missed adding those items. The directions for this cake aren't as standard as I'm used to and I skipped right over the line where I was supposed to put those in.

And yet, this is one of the lightest cakes I have ever had. It's sweet enough, just crunchy enough to be flavorful. If you didn't like walnuts, since they aren't in the cake, you could leave those out of the topping. This is really good.


The recipe says it will serve 10. I'm dividing up the rest and freezing it. It probably would feed 10 but I'm betting, if you try it, you'll find yourself eating it all day, it's that good. This is definitely a cake you'll want to plan to make. It took me 90 minutes from start to finish. 

Beverage:  Huckleberry tea

Deb

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