Baking Bouchon - Recipe 51: Coffee Cakes

I'm pretty much sold on making the recipes in this cookbook in miniature.  These were supposed to be made into six 6" cakes, but I don't know anyone (other than me) who likes to randomly eat a six inch cake all by themselves.  Therefore, I opted for 12 muffin sized cakes.  Much better for sharing.

There are three components to these coffee cakes.

1.  Cake: the cake is similar to a pound cake but is lightened with creme fraiche or sour cream.  I opted for sour cream because I already had it on hand and only one of my four regular grocery stores carries it.  I wasn't going to that one on this particular day so sour cream wins.

2.  Topping: a mixture of brown sugar and cocoa powder.  I thought the cocoa powder was a weird addition (CA was totally against it) but you can't really taste it in the final produce (unless you're CA who says he can definitely taste it but that it's wasn't too bad).

3.  Almond Streusel Topping: a combination of butter, almond flour, regular flour, sugar and salt.  Just like I used on the blueberry muffins.  It's good stuff!

These get assembled in the following order... cake batter, topping, more cake batter and then almond streusel topping.  Technically, I was also supposed to dust them with more powdered sugar, cocoa powder and ground cinnamon, but I totally forgot.  Oops.

The second oops of the day came when my muffins stuck to the pan. 

I really should learn to just put paper liners in my muffin tins before baking things.  It really would help me to avoid having hideously broken muffins at the end of the day.  However, I kind of hate paper muffin liners.  I'm convinced that I lose part of my muffin in that paper.  All that stuff that sticks to the paper is wasted - I can't eat it all, even when I scrape the paper with my teeth.  If don't have the paper, I get the whole muffin... even those last 2 grams of crumbs.  I want all the muffin I can get.

Regardless of a little stickage, these coffee cakes turned out really well.  They're great for breakfast because they're not too sweet.  The cake part stayed really moist when it baked and it has streusel on it which I'm a big fan of.  I definitely ate two of them... maybe I should have just made them the normal size.

Enjoy!
Julie