Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake

VOILA! I promised you baking and I got right down to business on Friday night! Still working on my Valentine’s lineup of treats so hopefully by next weekend, I will have something up. For now, here is one that I have been meaning to do: Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake. I haven’t made coffee cake since I was 15 probably. So that’s over 10 years now and I seriously forgot how simple it was. Although, this one was a bit layering so it took a bit more time.

Recipe: Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake (from Betty Crocker’s Christmas Cookbook)

Makes 18 servings

Ingredients

Coffee cake:

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 tsps baking powder

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp almond extract

4 eggs

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 can (21 oz) cherry pie filling

Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tbsps water

1. Heat oven to 350F. Generously grease 15x10x1 inch pan with shortening or cooking spray (Oops…forgot to do that!) . In large bowl, beat granulated sugar, butter, shortening, baking powder, vanilla, almond extract and eggs with electric mixer on low speed, scraping bowl constantly. Beat on high speed 3 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally. Stir in flour.

2. Spread two-thirds of the batter in pan. Spread pie filling over batter. Drop remaining batter by tablespoons onto pie filling.

3. Bake about 45 mins or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

4. In small bowl, mix glaze ingredients with spoon until smooth and thin enough to drizzle. Drizzle glaze over warm coffee cake. Serve warm or let stand until cool.

I love recipes that go straight to just mixing almost all the ingredients in then adding flour at the end. Most of the recipes actually would work like that too. I have a hand mixer so the whole standing around holding it for 3 minutes was testing my strength a bit, but it did work like a miracle to turn up the speed. There was one slight change that I made for this recipe and it was lowering the sugar to 1 cup. My mom is into healthy living so I lowered it so that she could enjoy it more. Also, I modified the glaze to 1/2 cup powdered sugar so that I could just put glaze on one half and the other half was made to not have glaze so it was also less sweet. It tasted fruity and had a crispy crust on the top. The texture was moist around the middle fruity layer and more crumbly at the bottom. I love this type of texture in any sorts of desserts so I loved it. My mom thought that it was perfect (without the glaze). As for my boyfriend who isn’t a huge fan of cherries, he still really enjoyed it. This recipe tends to taste better when warm so keep that in mind before you serve it or eat it.

What do you all think about coffee cakes? Fans? Any other flavors you’d recommend to me?