When I was a little girl, I recall my mother once making a yeasty sweet bread filled with cherries and a yummy glaze for Christmas morning. It tasted like heaven. Years later during a visit from my Uncle Leonard, I made a cherry coffee cake in Mom’s kitchen. I was teenager, and I was amazed that I could actually make something in the kitchen besides spaghetti!

Each December I think about those two recipes and stop short of making them. See, unfortunately, the canned cherries at our grocery store contain red food dye #40, a substance about which I am suspicious. (It’s banned in Europe and the U.K.) So I’d pretty much given up on my dreams of a Christmas morning sweet cake. Then by accident I stumbled across apricot filling colored with annatto.

Apricot isn’t exactly the same thing as cherry, flavorwise, but my mother loves apricot, and I figured some experimentation was in order. (When spring rolls around and assuming the Texas hill country peaches on our neighbor’s tree have a good yield in 2012, I aim to put away frozen peaches for this cake for next Christmas.)

Armed this year with a couple of old recipes and the ingredients in my kitchen–and notably lacking yeast to make a yeast bread, I whipped up this simple coffee cake. It’s not fancy, but it is delicious.

Yields one coffee cake

Ingredients

Cake:
1 12 oz. can apricot filling
2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup butter
3/4 milk
1 egg
1/4 tsp. lemon extract
1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Topping:
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup oats
2 Tbsp. butter

Method:

Heat oven to 375. Grease ceramic or glass pie dish and set aside.

Mix ingredients for cake well. Spread batter in dish. Using a food processor, pulse ingredients for topping. Cover cake with topping. If you wish, you can add a sprinkling of cinnamon on top.
Cook for 45 minutes or until the cake is no longer wobbly and the center passes the toothpick test.

Photos

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