Having coffee cake and eating it, too

Lately, I've had a craving for coffee cake. I blame this mostly on Keith, who tends to choose coffee cake as a treat at the shop where I regularly buy coffee beans. He usually lets me have a bite, and it's good.

But a bite just isn't enough. Nor is it any good on a quiet morning at home, when there's just enough snow on the ground to delay school and you really want baked goods with your cup of coffee. It was time to pick out a new recipe.

Of course, by the time I got it baked, I would be long done with my morning java, but there was always the afternoon cup. And the next day. And, maybe, the day after that.

I decided to test a toffee bar coffee cake out of the December 1999 Bon Appetit, mainly because it looked straightforward and I was intrigued by the toffee topping. I also had all the ingredients at home, except the toffee and buttermilk, which I picked up after dropping the kids off at school.

Step one was mixing butter, flour, dark brown sugar, regular sugar and salt together until it resembled coarse meal. Then, I scooped out 1/2 cup to reserve for the topping.










 After setting aside the topping mixture, I added some baking soda to the batter mix. I didn't want to add in the liquid ingredients until just before pouring the batter into the cake pan (9 x 13 x 2 Pyrex), because I didn't want the buttermilk and baking soda to react too quickly and keep the cake from rising in the oven.

So I finished up the topping mixture by adding in some broken up pecan halves and some Heath bar bits. The actual recipe calls for breaking up toffee bars, but it was easier to buy the brickle bits the grocery store stocks next to chocolate chips.

I went back to the batter bowl and beat in the egg, vanilla and buttermilk. Then I quickly poured it into the baking dish ...

... and sprinkled toffee topping all over it. Then I baked at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.

On the surface, the final version did not look appreciably different from the pre-baked version until you cut into it. Then, it looked like cake.

THE VERDICT: This cake has a wonderful texture. If I could get that texture in a chocolate layer cake, I'd be thrilled. It was perfectly moist and spongy. At first, I wasn't too crazy about the flavor: I didn't get as much of a sense of the pecans or toffee as I hoped, and was surprised when Will raved about it. But the flavor improved immensely overnight and tasted better the next morning. It was an excellent complement to a morning cup of coffee. Keith ate several pieces, and Alex snuck himself a piece at snack time. A definite keeper.

23 years of procrastination

Old habits die hard, really, really hard. To wit, it took me something like 23 years to make the pecan pillow recipe I clipped from Seventeen magazine way back when I was learning to cook. Then it took me another week to post about it.

To be honest, it was a very busy week and I've been so exhausted I didn't watch any of the Red Sox's first two playoff games, and therefore I blame myself for both losses. (Again, old habits die hard -- 23 years of baseball-watching superstition are not wiped out even by two World Series wins in the last six years.)

At any rate, last week I hauled out the Seventeen magazine album of recipes and makeup tips (for a glamorous look, try frosted vanilla eyeshadow with electric blue mascara!) and turned to the pecan pillows recipe. It is, as so many of the teen magazine recipes were back then, ridiculously easy. It also relies on convenient packaged crescent roll dough.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. The first step is to take 2 cups of pecans and chop them in the food processor. This explains the first 10 years or so I didn't make this recipe: I didn't have a food processor until some time after I got married.

Then you throw in 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, and blend until smooth. This step used up the last of my Cassia cinnamon, which pretty much negated any more baking until the replacement order arrived.

The next step told me shopping has changed in 23 years. At this point, I was supposed to crack open two cans of crescent roll dough -- got that -- and separate them into eight rectangles, which meant pinching two triangles of dough together along the hypotenuse sides. This was not difficult. There should be eight triangles in a can, or four rectangles.  However, the cans of dough I bought made six "large and buttery" crescents each, meaning three rectangles per can. Either I wasn't paying attention when I was shopping and bought the wrong version, or the crescent roll company completely changed the product.

No matter, it was still (kinda large) rectangles of crescent dough waiting to be filled. The recipe said to use 2 tablespoons of pecan butter filling; I adjusted to 2 1/2. I placed the filling in the center of the dough rectangles, and then folded the corners of the dough over the filling. These didn't look like neat little pillows, more like dim sum gone rogue, but as long as all the sides were pinched closed and nothing was going to leak out, I didn't care.

At this point, I was supposed to quickly brush the pillows with an egg wash. I skipped this step (read, forgot) and just put them on a baking sheet and popped them in the oven for 18 minutes.

VERDICT: These were surprisingly good. They were the sort of thing that makes you drink your milk because they go so well together. Keith and Alex loved them. I don't know that they were worth waiting 23 years to make them, but they were very tasty, and a nice quick dessert/breakfast treat. A keeper.