If You Make This Old Fashioned Sour Cream Coffee Cake, You Will Be Delighted With The Outstanding Taste And Texture Of The Cake!
This was a cake my mother made at least two or three times every year. It was definitely one of my mother’s favorite cakes to bake and to eat. She got the recipe from Lorraine Klein who is my Aunt Sally’s sister-in-law. Lorraine is a wonderful lady, and through the years, I have always appreciated her good nature and sense of humor. I always look forward to having conversations with her every Mother’s Day at my Aunt Sally’s or my cousin Janie’s house. How lucky it is for me that I have been able to gather so many wonderful recipes from my mother and her contemporaries. Most of all, I often think back on all the lovely, beautiful, and fulfilling hours I spent watching my mother bake her favorite cakes, this being one of them. She truly loved this cake, and therefore, I will always have a special place in my heart for this cake!
for the cake:
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 stick unsalted butter or margarine at room temperature
- 2 extra large eggs at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 2 cups sifted unbleached flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 8 ounces (1/2 pint) sour cream
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
for the filling:
- 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1 cup walnuts, chopped fine
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 10 inch tube pan well all over with butter or margarine.
for the filling: In a medium mixing bowl using a fork or spoon, mix the brown sugar, the cinnamon, and the chopped nuts by hand; set aside.
for the cake batter:
In a medium bowl, put the dry ingredients – the sifted flour, the salt, the baking powder; set aside.
Mix the sour cream with the baking soda by hand; set aside.
In large bowl of Kitchen Aid or electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter on medium to high speed with the sugar till light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and mix on high speed until light and fluffy. Mix in the vanilla.
Add the flour mixture and the sour cream mixture alternately to butter, sugar, and eggs, and vanilla mixture beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Add the flour in 4ths and the sour cream in 3rds. This is the part of the mixing where you don’t want to over-mix. You are really just adding these ingredients on a very low speed just to blend. Scrape down the bowl one or two times during this process to get any batter off the sides of the bowl.
Spoon 1/2 of the batter evenly on the bottom of the prepared tube pan. Then distribute about 4/5 of the filling mixture evenly all over the surface of the batter. Then spoon the remaining 1/2 of the batter over the filling, and smooth over the filling with a rubber spatula to cover the filling. Sprinkle the remaining 1/5 of filling evenly over the top of the batter.
Bake in the middle of the preheated oven 45-50 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.
Note: When I make this cake, I usually cut the cake into thirds, but I keep one third out for the family. Then I freeze the other two thirds of the cake. When company comes over unexpectedly, I know I always have delicious homemade sour cream coffee cake in the freezer. It defrosts in no time, and then it can be sliced and served on a pretty cake plate.