Pamela Price

Apricot Coffee Cake Recipe

I swear that I am not the only person that ate this wedge.

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

The marble pastry board is my mother's, er, mine.
The brilliant thing about coffee cake is that you pretty much dump everything and blend. Easy, peasy.
This recipe made a ton of topping, which I like. You can scale back 1/2 if you'd like.
I sprinkled cinnamon on top before baking. That's optional.
Warm from the oven, the aroma of this coffee cake is hard to beat.

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2 comments

  2. The frozen ones may need to be drained slightly and given a whir in the food processor to chop them up (if they weren’t already chopped up), but I bet it’d be great, @novagardener. And I’m sort of jealous!

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