Blog About Community & Coffee

Sunday evenings can be a depressing time of the week- preparing to get back into the daily grind of the work week, dealing with kids cranky from the interruptions in their usual schedule, and trying to find something to fill the hours til bedtime when all the stores have closed and the family activities are over.  Enter baking!  It’s fun, everyone can help, and if you make coffee cake, you have a yummy treat to look forward to on an otherwise potentially grim Monday morning. 

Now, I myself rarely attempt to bake alone.  Historically speaking, my baking successes have been… Spotty at best.  My sister bakes all the time, however, so on those (rare) occasions when I get the urge to whip something up in the kitchen, I generally force ask her to help.  Tonight was one of those nights…

We found a recipe at Cooks.com for coffee bars, which is as follows:

1 cup golden raisins (um, we don’t like raisins, so we substituted toffee and butterscotch chips)

2/3 cup strong coffee (we used Kaffeescape Big City Blend)

1/2 tsp cinnamon

2/3 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1  1/2 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

Glaze:

1 1/2 cups confectioner’s sugar

coffee… and a tsp of milk if you want

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Combine raisins/ butterscotch and toffee, coffee and cinnamon and let stand.  Cream butter and sugar, adding eggs one at a time, and beating well.

Mix and sift flour, baking powder, soda and salt.  Add chip coffee and cinnamon mixture.  Combine with butter and sugar mixture.  Spread batter in 9 x 13 pan.  Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.  Or, if you are us, decide that there is not enough batter to make a sufficiently plump coffee cake in a 9 x 13 pan and move batter to a 9 x9 pan.

Take cake out, glaze with confectioner’s sugar (mix with the coffee until it reaches a very thin consistency and then pour over cake) and let cool.  OR, if you have put cake into a 9 x9 inch pan,  you will discover that it is still essentially raw batter in the center.  You will momentarily lose sight of the task at hand while you discuss rather heatedly whose idea it was to ditch that 9 x 13 pan.  Then you will regain your focus, turn the oven down to 300 degrees, put the cake back in, and keep checking it every five minutes, for about another HALF HOUR, until is finally cooked through and only slightly overdone on top.  If, however, you are a well-seasoned cook, or even just a smart enough person to blindly follow recipes and not divert from them on whims which have proved in the past to be disastrous, you will have used the 9 x 13 pan as instructed and will be by now enjoying a bite of this rich, delicious, and surprisingly simple coffee cake.  Bon apetit!