Culture

The Hipster’s Cookbook: Coffee Cake

Every week in The Hipster’s Cookbook, Meghan Bongartz shows you how to make delicious food for not much money.

You know all the backs of cereal boxes that you read as a kid that told you that the only appropriate breakfast was a bowl of cereal with milk, a glass of orange juice, and a banana because it was healthy and balanced and if you finished nine more boxes you could send away for a prize? They were wrong. Coffee cake is the best breakfast, by virtue of its being cake that you get to eat at breakfast. Sure, we have muffins and waffles and pancakes (which do at least have “cake” in the name), and they’re all lovely, but there’s something extra special about eating a dish that you could just as easily serve at dessert for the most important meal of the day (although there’s also nothing wrong with having a slice of coffee cake for dessert, either!).

My method of finding recipes usually involves doing intensive research on whatever food I’m craving and then making up my own recipe anyways. So, since coffee cake has been in the back of my mind lately, I dug through the internet, discovered that for some reason everyone else only wants cakes with a crumb topping that they can pick off and eat without the actual cake, and decided that I wanted something with a cheesecake-like topping instead. In this recipe, a sour cream and egg mixture produces the creamy texture of a cheesecake without the heaviness of actually adding cream cheese. Canned cherries are generally super sweet, so they complement the tanginess of all of the sour cream in the cake perfectly.

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Sour Cream and Cherry Coffee Cake

½ cup unsalted butter

1 1/3 cup granulated sugar

4 eggs

24oz sour cream

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 ½ tsp cinnamon

2 15oz cans dark pitted cherries

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9×13 pan with cooking spray and set aside.

2) In a large bowl with an electric mixer, cream butter and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in 2 eggs one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Set aside ¾ cup of sour cream, then add remaining sour cream and vanilla, mixing until combined.

3) In a small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add to wet ingredients in two additions, beating until thoroughly combined.

4) Spread batter evenly in the prepared 9×13 pan and sprinkle cinnamon over the top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

5) Mix together ¾ cup sour cream, 2 eggs, and 1/3 cup sugar and set aside. Drain cherries and set on a paper towel to soak up some of the remaining liquid.

6) Remove cake from oven and reduce heat to 320 degrees. Spread the cherries over the top of the cake, followed by the sour cream and egg mixture, in even layers.

7) Return to oven and bake for an additional 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool before serving.

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