Day 66: Sour-Cream Coffeecake

If you've ever been to a blog called Smitten Kitchen (click here), you may be familiar with a style of food photography I like to call "prep porn." The photographs look like they're straight out of a Donna Hay cookbook: the ingredients are shot up close with extreme sharpness, and cooking tools are seen, blurrily, just beyond the focal length. The results are stunning, even for recipes that don't go well (see Smitten Kitchen's "Flan Flop" as an example), and the site makes me want to get a new digital camera. (The blogger, Deb, and her husband, Alex, use "a Canon EOS Digital Rebel and edit for light, cropping and white-balancing in either Picasa or Photoshop." Advanced, they are.) For now, I am practicing anti-prep-porn by photographing only one step in a recipe in a way that is practically useless and possibly unappetizing.

Tonight, I made a sour-cream coffeecake to bring to work. It's one of those recipes that everybody asks for, so here it is, modified slightly from its source, The Silver Palate Cookbook (look at the 25th anniversary reissue here). This cookbook is one of my all-time favorites, and also contains a phenomenal recipe for chili that uses beef and sweet Italian sausage. If I have a heart attack while eating this chili, then so be it.

The Silver Palate Cookbook's Sour-Cream Coffeecake

2 sticks butter, softened but not too soft
2 cups and 3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups shelled raw pecans, chopped (get these pre-chopped from Trader Joe's)
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 10-inch bundt pan and lightly dust with flour. (I used a 13 x 9 pan; works fine, just take a little extra care spreading the batter out.)

2. Cream together the butter and 2 cups of the sugar. Add eggs, blending well, then the sour cream and vanilla.


3. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

4. Fold the dry ingredients into the creamed mixture, and beat until just blended. Do not overbeat.

5. In a separate bowl, mix remaining 3/4 cup sugar with pecans and cinnamon.

6. Pour half of the batter into the bundt pan. [FROM VANESSA: You absolutely cannot "pour" this batter; it is way too thick, especially if you're trying to spread it across the bottom of a big, flat baking pan that is coated with flour. I drop dollops of batter onto the pan and then spread them together to form a smooth layer using a small offset pastry spatula. I do the same for the batter that goes on top of the sugar-pecan middle layer. Ignore this advice at your peril.] Sprinkle with half of the pecan and sugar mixture. Add remaining batter, then top with the rest of the pecan mixture.

7. Set on the middle rack of the oven and bake for about 60 minutes (or, about 45 minutes in a 13 x 9 pan), or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve warm.

YUMMY.