April 14 – April 20, 2025

Monday:                               Beef Barley Soup

Tuesday:                               Soup / Turkey-Pepper-Cucumber-Arugula Sandwich

Wednesday:                        Orzotto Alfredo with Sweet Peas, Chopped Salad

Thursday:                             PFC with Hilda and Tim

Friday:                                   Salad Nicoise

Saturday:                              Marherita Pizza with Anchovies

Sunday:                                 Easter Brunch – Baked Eggs, Skillet Potatoes with Peppers and Onions, Frankie’s Sausage, Lox,Bagels and Cream Cheese, Grandma Kelly’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Grandma Kelly’s Coffee Cake

How did I get involved in baking a coffee cake?  We – Beez, Billy, Andrew and myself –  don’t have much of a sweet tooth.  Although, back in the day, when the boys were growing like weeds, and there was so little time to get them ready for school, make breakfast, and often lunch, and get ourselves ready for work, they more or less fed themselves Eggos drowning in syrup, toaster strudel and pop tarts – RFK would have been appalled.*  In our defense and in defiance of all the earnest folks pontificating about (and, I suspect, profiting from) grains and tofu and greens and lentils, both boys are taller and stronger than us and quite healthy.

*I take some satisfaction from this.

But, to answer the question about how I came to bake a cake:  We were planning a brunch for nine on Easer Sunday and SWMBO was musing on the wonders of her grandmother Kelly’s coffee cake and wondering if we might recreate it for our celebration.  She didn’t have the recipe, and, it turned out, neither did her sister Mere.  But SWMBO’s dear friend Hilda did, which will come as no surprise to the denizens of our incredibly interrelated and co-mingled neighborhood. 

In the event, Grandma Kelly’s hand-written recipe was a bit light on details, seemed not have enough liquid and – well, we conjured up Ina Garten’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake on the web and went with that.  But I should be using the royal “we” here because it was understood from the get-go that the person who would try to resurrect this fabled cake would be me – not “we”.

I do make crostatas from time to time, and lots of pizza, and a dynamite apple pie, if I say so myself.  But it’s fair to say that baking is not really my thing.  We prefer savory to sweet and dessert is only a consideration at holidays or for dinner parties.  And even then, we often go with sweets baked by people who really know how to make them – bakers. 

When I saw the number of steps involved in making this coffee cake, I nearly decided against it.  I mean, we were talking 4 bowls, a food processor, a tube pan, a cooling rack, a tricky inversion and quick reversion of the cooled, completed cake and a final bowl to mix a glaze which would then be drizzled over the whole shebang.  I decided, nonetheless, to go ahead – one does not disappoint SWMBO if one can help it.  But I also chose to confront this Herculean task on Saturday so that Easter morning wouldn’t be totally chaotic and stressful and full of swearing and ill will.

Ah, but how did it turn out, you ask?  Well, after a lot of swearing and cursing and nearly ruining the weekend on Saturday (sorry, Beez), we had a completed cake.  And on Easter people raved about Beez’s baked eggs, the bagels, lox and cream cheese, the skillet potatoes with onions and peppers, Frankie’s Sausage and Wrights Thick-cut Bourbon Smoked Bacon.  Oh, and the coffee cake was a big hit, and care packages of left-over cake were sent forth to the four corners of Pittsburgh, and we sat down about 4:00 p.m., tired, but pleased.  While we did not achieve quite the same result as Grandma Kelly, we realized that we could probably charge quite a bit for this delicious concoction.

I’m still calculating the price, based on one day’s remuneration from my working days, plus the cost of the blood pressure medicine and the martinis I needed to restore my nervous system to its normal equilibrium and the orthopaedic injuries incurred while mixing the batter, moving the cake into and out of the oven (that sucker was really heavy) and cleaning up after the process.  I’m up to $764 so far.  Beez says that this is too high a price, but I’m thinking that if people could just taste a sample . . . but, of course, she’s right, as usual.

I can say that, if you’re willing to invest $800 or so of your time, attention and endurance, you too can bake this coffee cake.  If you do, your friends and family will thank you and Beez and I will be damn proud of you.  Here’s how . . .

 

 

 

Sour cream coffee cake

(adapted from Ina Garen)

Timing:                                                  2 ½ Hours

Ingredients:

12 tablespoons butter at room temperature

1 ½ cups of sugar

3 extra-large eggs (we used 4 large eggs)

1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 ½ cups cake flour (not self-rising) – As an alternative, you can use

        2 ¼ cups of AP Flour + ¼ cup of Cornstarch

1 ¼ cups sour cream

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon kosher salt

For the Streusel:

1 cup brown sugar, lightly packed

¾ cup AP flour

1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon kosher salt

 8 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, ½-inch diced

¾ cup large-diced pecans

For the glaze:  Note: we skipped the glaze, the cake was sweet enough.

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

2 tablespoons pure maple syrup

Prep:

Preheat oven to 350 F

Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan (bundt cake pan)

Mix and bake the cake:

Cream the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment for 5 minutes – it should be light and fluffy.

Add the eggs, one at a time, then add the vanilla and sour cream.

In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.  Now, with the mixer on low, slowly add the flour mixture and mix only until combined.  Use a spatula to finish mixing and be sure the flour is mixed in.

Now, make the streusel:  Place the brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, salt and butter in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until finely ground.  Transfer to a bowl and pinch the mixture together until it forms large crumbles.  Mix in the pecans.

Now spoon half of the cake batter into the pan and spread it out – level it a bit.  Sprinkle this with ½ the streusel.  Spoon the remainder of the batter into the pan and scatter the remaining streusel on top.

Bake for 60 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Set aside on a wire rack for at least 30 minutes to cool.

Take care transferring the cake to a platter, streusel side up.  (hold a plate over the tube pan, invert the pan and plate and tap the pan, the cake should slide out, and then hold a platter over the plate, invert again and you’ll have the cake, streusel top up, on the platter.

If you wish to glaze the cake, whisk the confectioners’ sugar and maple syrup together (add a few drops of water if needed) to make a thick glaze.  Drizzle the glaze onto the cake.  Serve at room temperature and try not to have seconds.