10 November 2007

My Mom's coffee cake

My mom's maiden name was Mueller. I don't know when the umlaut got dropped or when the pronunciation became "miller", but the German-ness of her family wasn't lost until my generation (and there are vestiges that live on...).

I grew up on meat and potatoes and it was my mom who taught me to cook; first by watching her in the kitchen and then with tips, guidance and encouragement from the couch in the living room. While I learned to cook dinner, I really never ventured into the baking realm and pies and other goodies that she seemed to produce with hardly a second thought have only of late even vaguely asserted their presence in my repertoire.

My sister Maris has been the keeper of many of Mom's recipes and among them was her coffee cake recipe. I copied it down a while ago and have tried several times to reproduce the coffee cake that Mom would make in the morning for breakfast. It has been unmitigated failure (OK perhaps there has been some mitigation to the failure, but I have sure as heck not reproduced the lovely thing in my memory, or even what I have seen in the case at Starbucks).

I am pretty sure that part of the problem lies in a transcription error somewhere along the line with respect to the recipe and I think that error has to do with the amount of flour (careful reading and comparison to Joy of Cooking and other sources leads me to this conclusion), but I don't know what the correct answer should be (maybe I should concede and just use Joy's version of the recipe (more on this when I get back to pie crust)).

BUT tomorrow morning another attempt will be made with the help of Francie. She says it is not hard and I believe her, I just don't know the magic...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's up, all is going nicely here and ofcourse every one is sharing facts, that's in fact excellent, keep
up writing.

Have a look at my web site; marvin tree pruner

Anonymous said...

Hi there to every body, it's my first go to see of this blog; this blog contains awesome and truly fine stuff in support of visitors.

Here is my web page :: league baseball bats

Anonymous said...

I usually do not leave a response, but I looked at through some
comments on "My Mom's coffee cake". I do
have a few questions for you if it's okay. Could it be just me or do some of the remarks appear like they are coming from brain dead visitors? :-P And, if you are writing on other social sites, I would like to keep up with you. Could you make a list of the complete urls of your social networking pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?

Look into my page ... stability ball

Anonymous said...

An outstanding share! I've just forwarded this onto a co-worker who has been doing a little research on this. And he in fact ordered me lunch due to the fact that I stumbled upon it for him... lol. So let me reword this.... Thank YOU for the meal!! But yeah, thanx for spending the time to talk about this matter here on your website.

My blog post - hand pole saw pruner