Mother's Day Brunch and the Easiest Coffee Cake Ever

On Mother's Day, my husband, my brother and I all worked together to make a special brunch for my mom. I fried up some delicious peameal bacon, hubby took care of toast duty and assisted with the delicious cheddar & green onion scramble my bro Duck put together.

A lovely little plateful to be sure, but something was definitely missing... something sweet!

Coffee cake ingredients, assemble! I am willing to bet you probably have all of the ingredients for the cake base in your cupboards and fridge right this very moment. Milk, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, an egg and your choice of butter, margarine or shortening. I was feelin' the Becel this particular day.

Like many of my favourite recipes, the directions here are basically measure & mix! Beat vigorously until smooth. Yes, you could use a hand mixer here, but frankly the whisk was closer.

Perhaps my judgement is not at its clearest before I've had breakfast. Oh well.

Next, you want to put together the topping for the cake, it's simply butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and flour. Mix until nice and crumbly. Add nuts or whatever you like at this point. Our secret ingredient?

You'll see in a couple of pictures. Gosh!

Next, grease and flour your baking pan of choice. Usually I would do this cake up in a simple 9" round pan,, but since it was a special day I thought it would be nice to give everyone their own little coffee cake.

These silicone jumbo muffin cups were the easiest thing I've ever greased & floured because they're so flexible and easy to manoeuvre.  The recipe turned out to be just enough to make 5 jumbo muffin-sized coffee cakes.

So, first, put a bit of batter in the bottom of your baking cup, then sprinkle with about a tenth of the topping.

And the 'secret ingredient' is... CHOCOLATE CHIPS! Allez cuisine!

Uh, I mean... a bit of semi-sweet chocolate chips, somewhat unexpected in a cinnamon-brown sugar topping adds a lovely richness to this cake.

Fill with more batter almost to the top, and sprinkle on some more topping.

Pop 'em in the oven at 350 degrees for about 25-27 minutes, and behold:

Oh... Yes, please!

The topping bakes up sweet and crunchy and chocolatey and melty and wonderful. And the inside?

Fluffy, light, buttery (Becel-y in this case, also good!) and streaked with more brown sugar and chocolate. Now THAT'S a brunch worth getting out of bed for.

At 3 PM.

Hey, we're not morning people.

Want to make your own?

Easiest Coffee Cake Ever
Adapted from Betty Crocker

Cake:
1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cups sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup shortening, butter or your favourite margarine
3/4 cups milk
1 large egg

Topping:
1/3 cup golden brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 tablespoons cold butter
1/2 cup chocolate chips (or nuts, or dried fruit, or bits of fresh apple, or whatever!)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

For the cake, simply combine all ingredients and beat vigorously by hand for 30 seconds, or use a hand mixer on low, until smooth. Mix topping together separately until crumbly.

Grease and flour pans of choice. For 9" round cake pan, layer batter and topping as desired and bake for 27-30 minutes. For jumbo-muffin size, bake 25-27 minutes, or until golden brown on top. For regular muffin size, 18-21 minutes.

Now that I listed those different variations for the 'secret ingredient' I have all kinds of ideas circulating in my head... When is Father's Day again?

Until next time!

Flowers for Mom: African Violet and Pansy Cookies

Now, I don't usually start with a shot of the finished product, because I'm a big fan of suspense, over here, but get an eyeful of these:

These cookies sprung initially from the mind of my coworker and pal Bonnie, who asked me to make cookies for her to give to her Mom on Mother's Day. At first it seemed a simple request, just, "Hey, do you think you can make cookies that look like flowers? Purple flowers? Like, pansies and violets?"

And I, in my incredible ignorance of all things flowers, replied, "Flower cookies? Sure! What could be simpler?"

Then Bonnie showed me some Google image results for pansies. 

Oh.

Pansies are actually kind of complex. Well, Bonnie, challenge accepted!

Despite my initial bravado, I actually decided to start with the violets as a warm-up. I couldn't find a simple 5-petal flower cutter (seriously, what the heck?) so I started with a round cutter and made notches for the spots in-between the petals.

Admittedly, this was not the look I was going for. The petals came out more square than I had intended. I need to go on a serious flower-shaped-cookie-cutter shopping spree.

But in the meantime, I had to make these look something like violets.

I piped onto the somewhat-misshaped cookies a better approximation of the violets' outline and filled with flood icing in - you guessed it - a shade of violet. Real violets are not flat, of course, so to try to give the illusion of the center being recessed, I added a spot of darker purple flood icing in the middle while it was still wet.

After the flood icing had set up for 15-20 minutes, I went back and added the lines on top for a bit of petal definition and three dots of yellow icing to each for the stamen.

Et voila, Viola, vive le violets! (Apologies, an avid aficionado of alliteration.)

Now, before I start showing you the pansies, have you ever seen a pansy? I mean, and really looked at it? Tell me, have ever really, really really ever seen a pansy?

They're bizarrely asymmetrical. They look like they have evil little faces. Look at them staring into your souls with their eyes of pure darkness and gaping mouths!

Okay, so I'm being a wee smidge dramatic here, but come on. I was pretty intimidated about making those into cookies!

I again started with a simple round cookie cutter, and trimmed bits away until I had the general shape.

Then, using a smaller circle cutter, I cut half-moons to add on as those weird additional layered petals pansies seem to have on one side (freaky, I tell you.)

If you looked at the sample pics of pansies, you may have noticed many varieties are multicoloured. Bonnie was really going for an all-purple assortment but I weaselled her into letting me do some white & purple pansies for variety.

So, as you can see above, I outlined the white petal sections in white, and the purple in purple. Pretty straightforward so far.

Fill in with thinned royal icing to match the outline, then, while it is still wet, add a yellow blob of flood icing for the center, and contrasting highlights to some or all of the petals.

Sorry for the cookie switch out, folks, took photos of different cookies at different stages. You know how it is.

Once you have your contrasting colours down, take a toothpick, and using quick strokes pulling from the center out, and then from the highlight colours inwards, work the icing until...

Well, until it looks like a pansy! It's hard to explain, really, I just kind of fiddled with it until I got this:

So basically, if your cookie looks a little like it has a streaky smiling monster face on it, you're on the right track.

For some of these, the yellow centers got a little too muddy with all the streaking. If that happens, just blob on a tiny bit more yellow icing while it's still wet.

The technique is pretty simple once you get the basic shape and look of the pansies down, which I'll admit, took a couple of tries. Luckily, I always make a few extras for just such practice, and there's always someone happy to help hide the evidence when mistakes are made.

But a bit of practice and perseverance, and...

Practically perfect pretty pansies, plus they're palette-pleasing! (Sorry, I just can't help myself.) 

I really hope these go over well. I know if I were a mom, I'd be pretty touched to get my favourite flowers in food form. All credit for that thoughtfulness of course goes to Bonnie!

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go prep to make my Mom's very favourite coffee cake for brunch in the morning. If all goes well, I'll let you guys in on it.

Until next time!