Potato Streusel Coffee Cake

I’ve been a bad Bread Baking Babe before, but this month takes the (coffee) cake. I was actually (uncharacteristically) ahead of the game, baking my cakes a few days before our November 16 posting date, but I then managed to leave for vacation without my notes. So, now that I’m back, I’ve exceeded the deadline by almost two weeks and am prepared to spend a good amount of time in detention. Before I go though, can I bake a couple more of these cakes?

Tanna chose the recipe this month, a wonderful potato coffee cake adapted from One Potato, Two Potato by Roy Finamore. She suggested doubling the amount of streusel topping for a single batch of dough; I missed the part about this suggestion applying if you split the dough into four cakes instead of two. So I had two cakes (a 9-inch and a 10-inch) with a whole heap of streusel, and this was NOT a bad thing!

Those parchment paper tabs are actually two strips placed at right angles to each other, laid in the bottoms of the buttered pans before placing the dough into them; they allowed me lift the cakes out of the pans without having to turn them over and lose any of the delicious streusel.

My only problem with recipe concerned the baking time: I baked the cakes considerably longer than specified — an hour and 15 minutes at 400F, plus and additional 10 minutes with the oven turned off, PLUS an additional 10 minutes with the door ajar — and they were stil underbaked in the center. So, although they managed an impressive oven spring, their centers fell as they cooled, and had something like a dense bread pudding consistency when cut open.

So next time, I will cut the batch of dough in half and make two 8-inch cakes, baking them for perhaps the same amount of time but at a lower temperature. And keeping the double batch of streusel, of course.

Of course, this would not be a Babes bake without each Babe having her own take on the cake; visit Katie’s roundup to see how the on-time Babes did theirs.