Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

Cream Cheese Coffee Cake is a wonderful way to start the morning, or even to share later in the day. This coffee cake is a dense and rich dessert. So often commercial coffee cake is overly sweet or has a texture that resembles Playdough, but not this coffee cake, this has a tunnel of a rich cream cheese inside.


This coffee cake is another post that has my favorite ingredient for this year, cream cheese, you can see cream cheese being served up in a variety of different ways in my 52 Weeks of Cream Cheese. This recipe was adapted from one in Cooks Illustrated magazine, I thought the initial recipe was complicated to make, and I wanted to simplify this recipe, for those of us who do not have a whole test lab to prepare food.

Yield: 16 servings.

Cake Batter

Cake
2 1/4 cups (11 1/4 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/8 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/8 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon table salt
10 tablespoons (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter , softened but still cool
1 cup plus 7 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon finely grated zest
4 teaspoons lemon juice
4 large eggs
5 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups sour cream
8 ounces cream cheese , softened

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spay a 10 inch tube pan with nonstick cooking spray. In am medium sized bowl add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and whisk together with a fork.

Using a stand mixer with the paddle attachment beat together the butter and 1 cup plus two tablespoons of sugar, and lemon zest at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time, incorporating into the batter, and adding next egg only after the previous one has been blended. Add 4 teaspoons of vanilla to this mixture.

Reduce speed of mixer to low, add in 1/3 of the dry flour mixture, blend in well, then add about half of the sour cream, blend well, then 1/2 of the dry flour mixture, blend, the remaining sour cream blending in, and then the remaining flour. Pour about 1/2 of this batter into the prepared tube pan, place the remaining batter into a small bowl, and set aside.

Using the bowl that you mixed the cake batter into add the cream cheese, 5 tablespoons sugar, lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla and beat until most and creamy. Add about 1/4 cup of the batter and mix in well. Spoon this cream cheese batter over the cake batter, spread the mixture towards the center of the pan. You are trying to achieve a nice tunnel, so don’t spread this out all the way to the edges. Top with remaining cake batter. Spread cake batter over the top evenly.

Bake for approximately 45 to 50 minutes, the cake will be golden. If you are using a cake tester to test the cake, the cream cheese layer will be wet. Cool cake for approximately 1 hour before serving.

Store the cake in the refrigerator.

You may want to drizzle the cake with a light glaze which could 1 cup of powdered sugar combined with 1 tablespoon of milk. This coffee cake has just the right amount of sweetness without a glaze.