streusel – Gourmet Project

The recipe courtesy of The Amateur Gourmet

A loaf is a dangerous thing. It hardly ever occurs to me to bake up some banana bread, or a lemon loaf. If you asked me to name my favourite desserts, no loaf would make the list. I don’t think about them, or go out of my way to get them, but the second a sweet cakey loaf comes out of the oven, I’m lost.

The insatiable craving that takes hold isn’t a conscious one. I have a slice with an espresso, dining companion and I chat about how nice it is, then I get on with my day. About half an hour later, I find myself back in the kitchen with the knife in my hand, and another reasonably sized slice on my plate. After all, it really is better when it’s fresh. I trick myself into the next slice with a lie about pumpkin and apples making it a healthy snack. It gets worse from there, I probably won’t have any appetite for dinner, and my dining companion may not get a second slice. These types of loaves are a triumph of marketing. They’re not cake, they’re bread! and look! they’re full of healthy fruits and nuts! At least a black-forest cake is honest, if you eat it for breakfast you know exactly what a bad person you are.

This particular temptress is made by sifting together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice in one bowl, canned pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs in another, and then adding the dry stuff to the wet stuff, and folding in chopped apples. The batter is divided between two loaf pans, sprinkled with the inevitable streusel topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter), and baked.

This bread is about as autumnal as it gets. Think pumpkin pie, now with carbs! If you’re a fan of the pie, this is the bread for you. Being in the house while it baked was a pleasure. Someone should distill it into a perfume. The bread was exceptionally moist, with a loose spongy crumb, and the barest hint of toothsomeness. The chunks of Granny Smith added a necessary textural counterpoint, and a little bit of bite to keep things in perspective. This topping worked better than some of The Book’s other efforts. In this case it was a flavourful glaze on the loaf, and not the overwhelming mess that sometimes results. I might toss in some crushed walnuts or pecans next time, but as it is it’s a winner

If you’re the sort of person who has a modicum of self control when it comes to baked goods in the house, I happily recommend this bread. For those of you who don’t, bake it and give it away, at least you’ll be able to enjoy the way your kitchen smells. Unfortunately I tried the second strategy, and for possibly the first time in human history a lab full of grad students was too busy to polish off free baking on the first go-round. I ended up with a third of a loaf on my desk for the afternoon, I’m not at liberty to say what happened next.

128. Streusel-Sour Cream Coffee Cakes p.645

Unfortunately there’s no recipe online.

The Book has a deep and abiding affection for streusel-toppings. I suspect that if the cooks at the Gourmet test kitchen leave their batter alone for too long, they’ll find that Ruth Reichl has snuck in and covered it in streusel. I don’t particularly have anything against streusel toppings, they add a nice textural contrast, but they tend to be very sweet. If the underlying baked good didn’t already have 30% more sugar than it needed, that could be a nice addition, but here it struck me as trying to gild the already candied lily.

The recipe starts by blending brown and white sugar with flour, salt, and butter. The streusel topping is made by separating out some of this mixture and working in cinnamon, additional butter, more brown sugar, and chopped pecans. A mixture of sour cream, egg, egg yolk, vanilla, baking soda, and orange zest is incorporated with the remainder of the flour-sugars-butter mixture, then divided up into 18 muffin cups, topped with the streusel, and baked.

There are a lot of things I liked about this recipe, but as is often the case The Book went overboard on the sugar (1 3/4 cups of sugar to 2 1/2 cups of flour). The cakes were rich, dense, and moist, with a soft slightly elastic texture. The orange zest in the cakes was an excellent touch. The topping was double extra sweet, but I really liked the complexity the pecans and molasses in the brown sugar brought to the cakes. I wish that the recipe had less sugar, and more nuts. Keeping the nuts out of the cake batter highlighted them and broke up the uniformity of the muffin. Unfortunately the streusel topping had a habit of falling off. Next time I’d be more careful about pushing the topping down into the batter.

This recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch chapter, but these cakes might work better with afternoon coffee, or as a dessert. They were a bit much for breakfast. I brought these over to a pot-luck brunch, to positive reviews, but they didn’t really do it for me. The next day I had one with an unsweetened espresso, and found I liked them much better. The concept and flavours are solid, and the bitter coffee provided some much needed contrast.