Today we had an unplanned playdate. Here's how it went down:[Iain's staff, while driving home from Babies-R-Us with a trunkful of diapers]
The Dad: What do you want to do? We could go to the library and browse the used bookstore...or we could call Callie's parents and see what they're doing...
The Mom: Let's call them and see if they want to do a playdate.
Meanwhile...in a car less than 1/2 a mile away...
[Callie's staff, driving home from Babies-R-Us and Barnes and Noble with a trunkful of diapers]
The Mom: What're we going to do now? This rain is such a total downer, dude [Callie's Mom is from Cali, baby]
The Dad: I don't know. Oh, my phone is ringing!
END SCENE
Obvy, we hooked up for some quality playtime at Casa Filthy (that would be our house). Pics of that to come. But on a rainy day even grownups need something to play with. So Sarah and I made coffee cake. We consulted about recipes, until I realized that my new copy of the Macrina Cookbook (a Christmas gift) was sitting next to the sofa.*
Sure enough, it contained a recipe for Brown Sugar Almond Coffee Cake. Yum.
We modified the recipe a little to reflect what we had on hand. For example, the original calls for fresh raspberries, but I had blueberries in the freezer (picked by me, last summer). Also, the cake took a little longer to cook and we used a different pan. Lastly, I only keep salted butter in the house so we omitted the little bit of salt the recipe calls for. But those changes are minor. The important thing is that the cake was lovely.It has a very delicate crumb, a crunch top (the topping is chopped almonds), and a surprisingly mild sweetness. Charles felt that it could benefit from some additional flavoring - like cinnamon - and Sarah, John and I agreed.
Iain and Callie were too busy shoving cake in their mouths to care.
Brown Sugar & Almond Coffee Cake from Macrina (buy the book!)
4c AP Flour
2.5 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2.5 sticks of butter (I used salted. If you use unsalted, which she calls for, add 1 teaspoon of salt)
1.75 cups light brown sugar
5 eggs
1/2 cup whole milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons almond extract
1 cup buttermilk (I used one cup whole milk plus one tablespoon white vinegar)
2 cups berries (she uses fresh raspberries, I used frozen blueberries)
1 cup whole almonds, coarsely chopped (put them in a baggie and whack it a while. Chopping round nuts is silly)
Powdered sugar for pretty-making
2.5 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2.5 sticks of butter (I used salted. If you use unsalted, which she calls for, add 1 teaspoon of salt)
1.75 cups light brown sugar
5 eggs
1/2 cup whole milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons almond extract
1 cup buttermilk (I used one cup whole milk plus one tablespoon white vinegar)
2 cups berries (she uses fresh raspberries, I used frozen blueberries)
1 cup whole almonds, coarsely chopped (put them in a baggie and whack it a while. Chopping round nuts is silly)
Powdered sugar for pretty-making
Directions:
- Obtain fun, willing-to-try-anything playmate, preferably from California.
- Preheat to 325. Grease a pan. This makes a lot of batter. She says use a 9-inch square pan, but I used a 9x13 Pyrex lasagna dish and it was pretty darn full.
- In a big bowl, mix flour, BP, BS, and salt (if using). Toss it a bit to mix, then set aside.
- Combine butter and sugar in your stand mixer (you really need one), set it on low and let it mix 5-8 minutes while you set up the other stuff. It should get light beige and fluffy-looking.
- In another bowl (this recipe makes a lot of dirty dishes), mix the eggs, milk, and extracts with a whisk. Slowly add this to the stuff in your mixer, on medium now, so that it gets mixed in pretty smoothly. At the end it's going to look like curdled stuff - no worries.
- Remove the bowl and get a wooden spoon. Add the flour mixture and the buttermilk alternately. First a bit of flour, then a bit of buttermilk, until it's all mixed in.
- Add the berries, mixing in gently (!).
- Pour the batter into your dish, sprinkle the almonds over top, and bake for 1 hour. If you test it and it's not yet done (mine was not) bake another 5 or so minutes and then see.
- Make dinner for two hungry toddlers, including chicken nuggets, carrot sticks with ranch dressing, hummus, milk and juice. By the time you're done with that, the cake will be cooler and you can cut it, dust it with powdered sugar, and enjoy. Discuss its relative merits with sous chef and the menfolk. Agree to add cinnamon or nutmeg next time.
*Last year we visited Seattle for the OAH Annual Meeting, and we rented a little condo downtown. It was fabulous, and the best part was that the building's first floor contains the Macrina Bakery. So for brekkie every morning we popped downstairs just as they opened and had freshly-made nosh with hot coffee (excellent, of course - it's Seattle!) and a soupcon of milk for The Pasha. Then, every evening, we popped downstairs and bought dessert to go with our scallops, dungeness crab, etc. It was a tough conference, let me tell you. Tough.
3 comments:
That looks so yummy. So. Yummy.
And I was all confused for a second. When you said Casa Filthy, I thought "I didn't have Iain and Fiona over to our house for a playdate, did I?"
Seriously - I have like 4 friends named Sara(h). It gets confusing.
In this case, I said to Sarah: "Don't look at the dustbunnies." So she started looking around for them!! And I said, "I said NOT to look for them," and she was totally unrepentant.
Try the angel thumbprint cookies in the Macrina cookbook. They are some of the yummiest cookies ever.
If I remember correctly, I modified the recipe a bit, in that I mixed it all with the mixer, and I cooked 2 cookie sheets at a time, sort of alternating the process, since you cook the cookie for a while, then take the sheet out of the oven to place the jam in the cookie, returning it to the oven to finish. I would put in a sheet while I prepared the second sheet. When it was ready for the oven the first sheet was ready for the jam and so on. It worked quite well.
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