Thursday, December 15, 2011

Sourcream Coffee Cake

If you have been reading this blog for some time, you know me. I am one of those who wants to understand how things work. Be it the combination of flavors in any kind of dish or a technical one. I do not like it when a recipe fails. That is because, it means that the formula given is not correct. I guess I cannot come out of the 'engineering' mind set I have. So, here is another one - a formula for a coffee cake. What is a coffee cake? In my opinion, it is something in between a cake and bread that is served as breakfast or a light dessert. It definitely is not as rich as a cake (remember, there are exceptions. There are fat free cakes too), but is richer than a quick bread. Some of the coffee cakes are made with yeast dough and they are very buttery. This recipe is a basic one. You can alter a lot of things and come up with many variations of a coffee cake.
One year back - Vegan Vanilla Cake
Two years back - Chekodilu
Ingredients: (Makes 1 8 X 4 loaf cake. Double the ingredients to use a bundt pan)
All purpose flour -1 cup
Sugar - 1/2 cup
Butter - 1/4 cup or 1/2 a stick softened (I used buttery spread)
Egg - 1 large at room temperature
Sour cream - 1/2 cup at room temperature (or thick yogurt)
Vanilla - 1 tsp
Baking Soda - 1/2 tsp
Baking powder - 1/2 tsp
Salt - 1/4 tsp

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 F (325 F in case of dark or glass pan). Grease a 8 X 4 loaf pan with vegetable oil spray and dust with flour. In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. Set aside. In another bowl, beat softened butter and sugar till fluffy. Add egg and beat till everything is mixed well. Add vanilla and 1/3rd of the flour mixture. Continue to beat adding half of the sour cream, 1/3rd flour mixture, remaining half of sour cream and the last 1/3rd of the flour mixture. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 40 - 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes and then turn on to the wire rack to cool completely. In case of baking double the volume in a bundt pan, bake for 55 - 60 minutes. This is not a very high cake and if you want one of those, you can triple it and bake in the bundt pan.

Variations:
You can add about 1/2 - 3/4 cup of chocolate chips, nuts or berries to this to change the cake. You could top it with streusel topping. You could even do layers of streusel topping. Possibilities are endless.

Today is day 15 of the Bake-A-Thon. Can you believe we have been baking every day and blogging about it for the past 15 days. I sure am not going to post any baking recipes for a while after New Year. Let's hope like that. My fellow bloggers doing this are - Preethi, Veena, Priya.

Enjoy.
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11 comments:

  1. Will make this one for Sunday tea. Thanks.

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  2. Thanks a lot for sharing with us this wonderful cake.

    Deepa
    Hamaree Rasoi

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  3. Champa I am going to make this . Bookmarked..Can i use regular yogurt????or hung curds?

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  4. Veena,
    You can use hung curd. Regular whole milk yogurt should work too.

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  5. I like how you explain the why's & the how's in your posts.
    I also like your writing style - straightforward :)

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  6. That looks so perfect there Champa:)
    Will try this sometime.

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  7. I doubled the recipe with some variations: 1 cup AP flour + 1 cup whole wheat flour, 2 egg whites + 1tbsp flax meal mixed with 3 tbsp warm water, 3/4 cup toasted walnuts and chocolate chips, 3 tbsp orange juice, 1tsp orange zest. Baked in a 9 x 5 loaf pan.
    The cake came out great. It was moist with a light taste of orange.
    Thanks Champa for another awesome recipe :).

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    Replies
    1. Swapna, Thanks for the feedback. I am glad you liked it. To be honest, feedback like this is the main motivation behind this blog.

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