Officially this should be called a Streusel Coffee Cake. Dreamed up by our hostess Tanna this month. We were at her virtual kitchen table sampling the catch of the month and trying to decide which coffee cake was worthy to bake. This was going to be it. A Streusel Coffee Cake so called because you are supposed to top it with a lovely mixture of nuts, oat flakes and raisins.
However, very recently this household is graced with two Brace Bearing Boys and since a crunchy topping with nuts is not exactly what their doctor ordered I decided to do away with the Streusel. Hence…. a naked cake like bread. I fiddled around with the original recipe (halving the recipe making one cake, adding more and more flour , upping the yeast and also leaving the flax seed out, plus leaving the sponge in the fridge for two days. Oops.) and somehow the resulting cake went sky high and took forever to bake. I think the final baking time was close to 50 minutes, maybe even longer. I stopped counting minutes after a while.Streusel Potato Cake (Kartoffel Kuchen) (this is my adapted recipe from “One Potato, Two Potato” - Roy Finamore
for the original please refer to Tanna)
Yield: 1 large (10”) round cake
120 g potato, peeled and cubed
(reserve cooking water and up it to approx. 200 ml total liquid)
70 g butter, cut into pieces
1.1/2 tsp dry yeast
70 g soft light brown sugar
handful of raisins in the dough instead of the topping
1 large egg
420-470g AP flour
100 gr whole wheat flour
⅛ tsp nutmeg, freshly grated
¼ tsp salt
Cook potatoes until very tender, just falling apart. Drain and reserve potato water.
- Rice or mash the potatoes. Combine with butter and 205 ml warm potato water. Allow butter to melt and water to cool to luke warm.
- In a standing mixer bowl: mix together the potatoes, potato water & butter, yeast, sugar, eggs and 1 cup of flour. Beat until smooth. This is supposed to be VERY liquid at this point. (I added more flour to get a more doughy sponge.) Cover the sponge with plastic and leave in a warm place until it's bubbling happily.
- In the original recipe this takes1 hour, you can also leave the sponge in the fridge for about 5 hours.
- Stir in remaining flour, nutmeg and salt using the dough hook for about 5 minutes. Dough should be smooth. Add more flour if needed (I did) to make a workable dough. Cover again & leave to rise until doubled. (you can also let it rise in the fridge overnight)
- Punch the dough down and turn out onto a lighty floured surface. Shape into a round. Place into a greased 10-inch round cake pan. As you can see I used a Bundt pan.
- Preheat oven to 400° at least 20 minutes.
- Bake cakes at 400°F (200ºC) 40 - 60 minutes. until cooked in the middle (check with a thermometer). Tent with foil if it gets too brown. Cool on rack, but this is also good lukewarm.
I think it’s the whole coffee cake idea here but the thing went largely untouched on the counter for a couple of days…. I think my family loves to know exactly what it is they are eating. (Is it a bread, Is it a cake, noooo it’s a plane. Should we eat it with butter? During a meal? As a snack? You know what, we don’t touch it until we are sure what to do with it.) Granted it looked great, high domed, nicely done, lovely crumb but ugh.. it was dry! I guess that was me adding too much flour in the mix.
Oh well. At least we got the pictures!
