Thank you for reading Between the Layers! Please enjoy and share this free post with your friends. The Need for Coffee Cake Now - No. 308Plus a SWEEPSTAKES with Schermer Pecans and Rodelle vanilla you’ll want to enter!
YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS LIVING in England, I spoke to a group of local cooks about our American style of coffee cake. With sour cream, cinnamon, and finely chopped pecans on top and swirled throughout, it was my idea of comfort. They loved the cake. But when I shared the recipe, the ladies thought I had made a grave mistake. Where was the coffee in the coffee cake? I blushed, explained it was cake to serve with coffee, but I never looked at coffee cake the same way again. Maybe some recipes really do contain coffee, I wondered, but the coffee cake of my youth was much simpler and scented with cinnamon. We would bake it in loaves for gifts or in big pans to be cut into chunky squares for brunch.
Good coffee cake has long been found on the pages of magazines and community cookbooks.It appeals to those folks who tend to bake ahead for holiday brunch, entertain house guests, host book club, or are the thoughtful ones who bring cake to the office. Or used to before Covid. Maybe if we want the world to be a better place, we should just bake more coffee cake and share it. And here’s why:
Recipes + Georgia pecans + nice vanilla = BlissI can’t think of a better way to celebrate fall, coffee cake, my book tour, and all of you than to offer you first dibs on a wonderful SWEEPSTAKES that debuts today. Just in time for fall baking, the winner of this Sweepstakes receives a bounty of fresh Schermer Pecans as well as a collection of Rodelle baking products, including their fabulous vanilla extract. In addition, you win four of my cookbooks and Williams-Sonoma loot. The total value is $500. For this collaboration, I’m happy to introduce you to two companies with very high standards. Pecans are in Schermer owner Putt Wetherbee’s blood. His father was a pecan grower since 1959 and purchased Schermer Pecans in 1977 and with it became the owner of one of the largest pecan companies in Georgia. Putt’s namesake was the pecan planter and philanthropist Francis Flagg Putney, who was part of the largest commercial pecan planting that took place in South Georgia around the turn of the 20th century. Some of those orchards still remain in the family as it takes generations for pecan trees to set root and bear pecans, the sweet indigenous nut of the South.
And for the record, Georgia pecan growers pronounce their nut “p’kahn” not “PEE-kan.” (Although I have learned from book tour that the latter pronunciation is popular outside the South as well as South Carolina!) Rodelle has an interesting backstory as well, beginning in 1936 when Paris food chemist PJ de Flores settled in Denver, Colorado. Realizing that America lacked a high-quality pure vanilla extract supplier, he and a business partner mined their knowledge and produced their own. The chateau depicted in the Rodelle logo today is a nod to the small south-central French town of Rodelle where de Flores was born. Rodelle produces a really nice fair trade Madagascar Bourbon vanilla as well as Dutch-processed baking cocoa and a line of amazing baking ingredients, extracts, and spice blends all assembled in a wind-powered manufacturing facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. How’s book tour going? Crazy but wonderful. I am wrapping up a two-week leg taking me to Atlanta, Greenville, Columbia, Savannah, Beaufort, Charleston, Murrell’s Inlet in South Carolina, and on up to Southern Pines in North Carolina, as well as Winston-Salem, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Cashiers. The Helene victims are very much on everyone’s minds as I travel through the Carolinas, driving home the point that we are one. We are community. We need each other more than ever. It’s a humble idea and an old one, and it’s something that’s been imprinted in the mindset of my home region for a very long time. But unfortunately with climate change and increasing storms and violent weather, it’s going to be something we need to remember. Stay safe! - xo, Anne  Book tour from Charleston to Savannah to Greenville to Atlanta to Durham and Winston-Salem.
THE RECIPE (FROM BAKING IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH): Church Ladies’ Sour Cream Coffee CakeThis recipe is from Favorite Recipes Collected by United Methodist Women of Pleasant View, Tennessee, a cookbook belonging to the mother of my good friend Debbie. Pleasant View is a small town in central Tennessee where church life has been an important part of one’s calendar. And you could say that applied to much of the South where coffee cake has been a go-to for taking to church on Sunday mornings. Some coffee cakes are baked in loaves and others in tube pans, but I prefer the ease of a 13-by 9-inch pan. And while some recipes don’t always rise perfectly because of imperfect leavening, this one is perfect. Serves 12 to 16 Prep: 20 to 25 minutes Bake: 38 to 42 minutes
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