The Need for Coffee Cake Now - No. 308

Plus a SWEEPSTAKES with Schermer Pecans and Rodelle vanilla you’ll want to enter!

YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS LIVING in England, I spoke to a group of local cooks about our American style of coffee cake. With sour cream, cinnamon, and finely chopped pecans on top and swirled throughout, it was my idea of comfort.

They loved the cake. But when I shared the recipe, the ladies thought I had made a grave mistake. Where was the coffee in the coffee cake?

I blushed, explained it was cake to serve with coffee, but I never looked at coffee cake the same way again. Maybe some recipes really do contain coffee, I wondered, but the coffee cake of my youth was much simpler and scented with cinnamon. We would bake it in loaves for gifts or in big pans to be cut into chunky squares for brunch.

An illustration from a 1948 Vogue magazine. A woman cuts cake for two young girls in party dresses. When I say we should bake more coffee cake, I don’t mean we have to pull out our orchid-colored ottoman silk with bateau neckline and peplum waist. But you decide Getty Images.

Good coffee cake has long been found on the pages of magazines and community cookbooks.

It appeals to those folks who tend to bake ahead for holiday brunch, entertain house guests, host book club, or are the thoughtful ones who bring cake to the office. Or used to before Covid.

Maybe if we want the world to be a better place, we should just bake more coffee cake and share it. And here’s why:

• Coffee cake straddles the line between bread and cake, which means it’s appropriate all day long. No rules.

• Coffee cake is bedecked with cinnamon and enriched with sour cream, two very essential food groups.

• And lastly, coffee cake doesn’t have to be served with just coffee. You can wash it down with hot tea or milk.

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Recipes + Georgia pecans + nice vanilla = Bliss

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate fall, coffee cake, my book tour, and all of you than to offer you first dibs on a wonderful SWEEPSTAKES that debuts today.

Just in time for fall baking, the winner of this Sweepstakes receives a bounty of fresh Schermer Pecans as well as a collection of Rodelle baking products, including their fabulous vanilla extract. In addition, you win four of my cookbooks and Williams-Sonoma loot. The total value is $500.

For this collaboration, I’m happy to introduce you to two companies with very high standards. Pecans are in Schermer owner Putt Wetherbee’s blood. His father was a pecan grower since 1959 and purchased Schermer Pecans in 1977 and with it became the owner of one of the largest pecan companies in Georgia. Putt’s namesake was the pecan planter and philanthropist Francis Flagg Putney, who was part of the largest commercial pecan planting that took place in South Georgia around the turn of the 20th century. Some of those orchards still remain in the family as it takes generations for pecan trees to set root and bear pecans, the sweet indigenous nut of the South.

And for the record, Georgia pecan growers pronounce their nut “p’kahn” not “PEE-kan.” (Although I have learned from book tour that the latter pronunciation is popular outside the South as well as South Carolina!)

Rodelle has an interesting backstory as well, beginning in 1936 when Paris food chemist PJ de Flores settled in Denver, Colorado. Realizing that America lacked a high-quality pure vanilla extract supplier, he and a business partner mined their knowledge and produced their own. The chateau depicted in the Rodelle logo today is a nod to the small south-central French town of Rodelle where de Flores was born.

Rodelle produces a really nice fair trade Madagascar Bourbon vanilla as well as Dutch-processed baking cocoa and a line of amazing baking ingredients, extracts, and spice blends all assembled in a wind-powered manufacturing facility in Fort Collins, Colorado.

How’s book tour going? Crazy but wonderful. I am wrapping up a two-week leg taking me to Atlanta, Greenville, Columbia, Savannah, Beaufort, Charleston, Murrell’s Inlet in South Carolina, and on up to Southern Pines in North Carolina, as well as Winston-Salem, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Cashiers. The Helene victims are very much on everyone’s minds as I travel through the Carolinas, driving home the point that we are one. We are community. We need each other more than ever.

It’s a humble idea and an old one, and it’s something that’s been imprinted in the mindset of my home region for a very long time. But unfortunately with climate change and increasing storms and violent weather, it’s going to be something we need to remember.

Stay safe!

- xo, Anne

Book tour from Charleston to Savannah to Greenville to Atlanta to Durham and Winston-Salem.

THE RECIPE (FROM BAKING IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH):

Church Ladies’ Sour Cream Coffee Cake

This recipe is from Favorite Recipes Collected by United Methodist Women of Pleasant View, Tennessee, a cookbook belonging to the mother of my good friend Debbie. Pleasant View is a small town in central Tennessee where church life has been an important part of one’s calendar. And you could say that applied to much of the South where coffee cake has been a go-to for taking to church on Sunday mornings. Some coffee cakes are baked in loaves and others in tube pans, but I prefer the ease of a 13-by 9-inch pan. And while some recipes don’t always rise perfectly because of imperfect leavening, this one is perfect.

Serves 12 to 16

Prep: 20 to 25 minutes

Bake: 38 to 42 minutes

• Vegetable oil spray and parchment paper for prepping the pan

• 16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 1 cup (200 grams) sugar

• 3 large eggs

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

• 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

• 1 cup (8 ounces) sour cream

• 2 1/2 cups (300 grams) all-purpose flour

• 2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• For the filling:

• 1/2 cup (100 grams) sugar

• 1/2 cup (2 ounces) finely minced pecans

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1. Heat the oven to 350º F, with a rack in the middle. Lightly mist the bottom of a 9- by 13-inch pan with vegetable oil. Line the bottom with parchment paper.

2. Place the butter and sugar in a large bowl of an electric mixer and beat on low speed until just combined, 1 minute. Increase the speed to medium and beat until creamy and light, 2 minutes more. Add the eggs, beating after each addition just to incorporate, and add the vanilla. Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl.

3. Stir the lemon juice into the sour cream and set aside. Place the flour, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl, and whisk to combine. With the mixer on low speed, alternately add the flour mixture and the sour cream to the batter, beginning and ending with the flour. Set aside.

4. To make the filling: Place the sugar, pecans, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a small bowl, and stir to combine. Dollop half of the batter into the prepared pan, and smooth the top with a metal spatula to reach the edges. Spoon half of the filling over the top. Dollop the remaining batter on top, carefully spreading to the edges, taking care not the disturb the filling underneath. Spoon the remaining filling on top. Place the pan in the oven.

5. Bake until the cake is deeply golden, and the top springs back when lightly pressed with a finger, 38 to 42 minutes. Remove to a wire rack to cool at least 30 minutes, then slice and serve.