Today – the actual holiday – is the greyest, rainiest, yet. And I got up the latest, too. It was too misty and damp for a wimp like me to bike, so I drove to do the grocery shopping, then came home to make a sour cream coffee cake, to use up the tart rhubarb puree I made yesterday, with honey and lemon and candied ginger, and pine nut streusel, a la Heidi. We ate them on ice cream last night. Not the best cake – I tried to thick up the filling with cornstarch, but it was still pretty wet. I liked the sour cream cake part a lot though – I started with this Smitten Kitchen recipe – that I do still want to make as a crumb cake – Big Crumb Coffee Cake – and added a little to it so I could make it in a 9-inch pan – and up the filling to cake ratio, since I had all that wet rhubarb. Deb Perelman uses a variant of Rose Levy Berenbaum’s cake mixing technique, where instead of creaming the butter and sugar, then adding eggs and flour, you whisk the dry ingredients, add the butter – which must be softened – and a little of wet ingredients, beat until smooth, and then add the rest of the flour and beat some more, until smooth again. It seems to work perfectly for a thick batter like this.
My version of the cake:
1/2 cup sour cream
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons softened butter, cut into 8 pieces
Mix the sour cream, eggs, and vanilla in a small bowl or spouted 1-cup glass measure. Mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt in the bowl of your mixer. Add butter and about half of the sour cream mixture and mix on medium speed until flour is moistened. Increase speed and beat for 30 seconds – I just count to 36. Add the remaining sour cream mixture and beat about a minute, scraping down the sides of bowl with a spatula, until the mixture is a little fluffy and smooth.
Bake at 325° in a greased 9 x 9 square baking pan, with the filling and topping of your choice. I filled mine with wet rhubarb, and pine nut struesel, and topped it with cinnamon sugar – since the streusel was already cooked, I didn’t want any on the top of the cake, because I thought it would burn.
- Cake in pan
- Dished out
