Category: Cookies and cakes

Georgia’s Raspberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

Until she retired a few years ago, Jerri was an active member of the St. Croix Valley Music Teachers Association. The members are professional music teachers and performers, and most meetings feature a program of interest to people who believe that music is an important part of education.

But lest you think that music teachers are concerned only with symphonies, operas, art songs or other types of classical music, consider the fact that members took turns to provide a homemade dessert for attendees at each meeting. In addition to making sweet sounds in the studio, music teachers make sweet treats in the kitchen.

One day Jerri was so impressed with the dessert that she came home with the recipe jotted down on the back of the meeting agenda. It was a coffee cake made by Georgia, one of Jerri’s friends who taught piano in Ellsworth, Wisconsin.

INGREDIENTS:

For the streusel topping and cake:
2 1/4 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup margarine
1/4 cup butter
1 large egg
3/4 cup sour cream
1 tsp. almond extract
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda

For the topping:
8 oz. soft cream cheese or Neufchatel cheese
1 tsp. almond extract
1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup raspberry jam
1/3 cup slivered or sliced almonds

PROCEDURE:

First, soften a package of cheese. Preheat the oven to 325º and grease a nine by nine by two-inch baking pan.

Next, make the topping and batter. Start by stirring the flour and three-fourths cup of sugar together and cutting in the margarine and butter as if you were making a crumb mixture for biscuit dough. Set aside one cup of the mixture to use as part of the topping.

Mix the salt, baking powder and baking soda into the crumb mixture. Beat one egg until it is lemon colored. Beat the egg and a teaspoon of almond extract into the sour cream, then beat the liquid into the crumb mixture. Beat vigorously until you have a smooth, thick batter. Spread the batter evenly into the greased pan.

Next make the topping by stirring another egg and a second teaspoon of almond extract into the cream cheese. Stir in a quarter cup of sugar and beat until smooth and creamy. Spread the mixture over the batter.

Use a teaspoon to dab small globs of raspberry jam evenly over the cheese mixture, then sprinkle with the reserved crumb mixture and top everything with the slivered almonds.

Bake for about an hour. Test for doneness at fifty-five minutes by pressing gently with the tip of your finger near the center of the cake. If the cake springs back it is done.

NOTES: With a teaspoon of almond extract in the batter and another in the topping, this coffee cake reminds me of one of my favorite Danish pastries, but it is much easier to make. Just remember to reserve a cup of the crumb mixture before you begin adding the liquids.

Georgia’s recipe called for for cream cheese, but I prefer to use Neufchatel cheese whenever possible, since it has less fat. When I made this coffee cake, the ladies at Jerri’s bridge group said it tasted good, so the Neufchatel appears to be fine in this recipe.

Georgia noted that you can use other jams or preserves if you wish. Blueberry might be a good choice.

Vicki’s Grandmother’s Rhubarb Cake

“You can make anything you want. Just make sure that it gets eaten,” said Jerri when I volunteered to take over most of the cooking after my retirement. Though I have been forced into surreptitious trips to the compost heap on a handful of occasions, most of the time it has been fairly easy to share the output of our kitchen with others.

The most challenging recipes are ones for desserts, since neither Jerri nor I needs the extra calories or carbohydrates in a good pie or cake. And a dessert sitting on the table or in the refrigerator is a temptation we find hard to resist. Our motto should be, “If it is there, it should be eaten.”

Thus, what some of our friends and neighbors might imagine to be generosity is often prompted by my need to clear the kitchen to make room for the next recipe. I truly appreciate people who will accept a plate of cookies, a couple slices of pie or pieces of cake. They are contributing to a less combative household and making it easier for us to step on the bathroom scale in the morning.

However, sometimes people reciprocate when I drop off something. Just a few days ago, when I delivered pieces of Pumpkin Crack to our friends Vicki and Alan, Vicki met me at the door with a plate of rhubarb cake. I love rhubarb cake, and hers was delicious. Even better, it didn’t taste as rich as the crack, so the exchange may have been in our favor.

When I asked Vicki for her recipe, she said she would email it and told me that it was her grandmother’s. I asked for a little history, and she obliged. Here is Vicki’s account of her grandmother’s rhubarb cake.

“Rhubarb Cake Recipe (a recipe from Vicki Burgess George’s mother Wilma Larson 1910-2007 and her mother before her, Emma Retrum 1883-1967)

“My mom was a great baker but she usually made simple things. Well…not always. She did make putzy things too such as krumkake and rosettes for holidays and the weekly loaves of homemade bread and cake doughnuts.  The latter were fried in pure LARD!  She was “trained” to cook and bake by her Norwegian mother in the late teens and 20’s.  

“As a young farm housewife in the depression era, when money was scarce, my mom still baked weekly and cooked large meals for my dad, his brother, and mom’s parents who all lived with them on a farm in Maiden Rock, WI. Unfortunately, she didn’t train me her youngest child as well as her mother trained her.  I think this was because when I was growing up, she worked a full time factory job outside the home which was not the norm in the 50’s.

“Notice that she assumes I already know how to cream sugar and butter, etc (see her direction “mix as you would for a cake”).  I make this recipe with the buttermilk instead of the orange juice.  Anyway, this is a simple recipe using mom’s homegrown rhubarb.

“Now I make it using rhubarb from a plant originally from Alan’s grandparents’ farm in northeastern Wisconsin that he has successfully transplanted four times!  He has moved it from his parents’ home in South Milwaukee, to parsonages in both Grantsburg and New Richmond, Wisconsin, and now to our home on the Willow River.  

“I know he uses only aged horse manure to fertilize the rhubarb.  He says chicken manure is too stinky and the aged horse manure works.

Enjoy (the cake…not the manure)!”

The recipe is very similar to “Nellie’s Rhubarb Cake which I shared with readers earlier this summer. Vicki’s grandmother’s recipe uses butter and buttermilk instead of shortening and sour milk, and it omits the salt. The salt in the butter and buttermilk eliminates the need for extra salt, and the two ingredients do make a subtle difference in the flavor of this cake.

I have kept the instructions as Vicki’s mother gave them to her. As Vicki noted, they assume that you know how to make a cake. More complete directions are in the notes.

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk (or orange juice)
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups rhubarb (cut small)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon

PROCEDURE:

Here are Vicki’s grandmother’s directions. “Mix first seven ingredients as you would for a cake.  Stir in rhubarb.  Pour batter into a greased/floured 9 x 13 cake pan.  Sprinkle one-half cup white sugar and one teaspoon cinnamon (mixed) on top of batter.  Bake at 350º for 40-50 minutes.”

NOTES: Clean and chop the rhubarb stalks into a quarter to half-inch dice. Grease and flour a nine by thirteen inch cake pan. Preheat the oven to 350º.

Cream the sugar and shortening. Use all-purpose flour. Put the flour and soda into a sifter and sift a half cup of flour into the creamed sugar. Stir it well with a wooden spoon. Beat the egg until it is lemon yellow and mix it with the milk. Pour about a third of the milk into the sugar and flour mixture and stir it until it is smooth. Stir in another half cup of flour, then another third cup of milk and beat the mixture until it is smooth. Repeat these steps, ending with the final half cup of flour and beat well.

Stir the vanilla and rhubarb into the batter and pour it into the pan.

Mix a teaspoon of cinnamon into a half cup of granulated sugar and use a teaspoon to sprinkle it evenly over the top of the batter.

Put the pan on a center shelf in the oven and bake for forty to fifty minutes. Test for doneness after forty minutes. A toothpick inserted near the middle of the cake should come out clean. If it does not, bake for another five minutes and test again.