Strawberry Sour Cream Streusel Cake

In case you haven' t planned an Easter dessert, this will serve 10-12, is easy to make and doesn't dirty every dish in the kitchen. If memory serves (and sometimes memory does not), this is a Nigella Lawson recipe and we should all thank her very much. I believe it was in the New York Times. Haven't seen her recipes there for a while. They should bring her back for an encore.

Strawberry Sour Cream Streusel Cake

For the Strawberry Puree:
8 ounces strawberries
3 T. strawberry jam
2 t. cornstarch
2 t, vanilla

For the Cake:
Vegetable oil for pan
3.4 c. sugar
2 c. plus 2 T. flour
1 t. baking powder
½ t. baking soda
12 T. (1 ½ sticks) cold butter, cut into ½ inch cubes
1 cup sour cream
1 large egg
1 T. vanilla

For the crumble topping:
2 t. Demerara or turbinado sugar

Prepare strawberry puree: In a blender, combine berries and jam. Make a paste of cornstarch and vanilla, and add to blender. Puree until smooth. Set aside.
Prepare cake: Heat oven to 375 degrees. Oil a 9 inch springform pan and set aside. In a large bowl, combine sugar, flour baking powder and baking soda. Sprinkle in butter cubs and rub them in by hand until mixture resembles large coarse crumbs. Remove ½ cup and set aside. To large bowl, add sour cream , egg and vanilla. Mix well.
3 Using a little over half the cake batter., drop dollops of batter into the pan. Pat batter across bottom of pan and about 1 inch up sides; mixture will be very stick and somewhat uneven. Add strawberry puree, making an even layer across bottom of pan and leaving a rim of dough above it. Cover with remaining cake mixture.
4 Prepare crumble topping: In a medium bowl, combine reserved ½ cup dough and Demerara sugar. Stir with a fork to mix. Sprinkle evenly over cake.
5 Bake cake until lightly golden, about 45 minutes. Cool complete before serving.,
6 Yield One 9-inch cake.

I served the cake with a side of slice strawberries, but whipped cream is also good. Of course, whipped cream is good generally. Of course you could do both. Yum!

Where My Whimsey Takes Me: Food, Cats and the Red Sox

Food for thought: last night, just before the steaks went on the grill, I thought to myself, "those are 'way too big for us to eat both of them." That being said, we ate one and a small piece of the other. This is what you do with leftover steak for another meal:

Create a sauce from mayonnaise, sour cream, Dijon mustard, capers, and salt and pepper.
Slice the cold steak thinly. Serve on a bed of lettuce with thinly sliced red onion rings, tomatoes and the sauce.

I concoct a new dessert. Although beaucoup recipes call for it, instant espresso powder is hard to come by. Medaglia d'Oro used to make it, but I haven't seen theirs in a store for a donkey's age. I buy it from King Arthur catalogue, but I ran out. Wanted to order at least a couple things to merit the postage. I make a South Beach Diet dessert from low-fat ricotta, cocoa, instant espresso powder, a tad of vanilla and 1 1/2 packets of Equal. It tastes good and doesn't induce guilt. But we are out of the espresso powder.

I toasted some sliced almonds, and added almond extract (just a little), low fat vanilla yogurt, to the low-fat ricotta. And the Equal. Mixed it up good in the mixer. Yum! This was a winner. The yogurt made it smooth and creamy. I like the Stonybrook Farm yogurt best.

These are some of my shabby little secrets.

I hauled an extra plastic bag of bird seed to the garage a couple days ago. Today, S.O. and I were on our way to Home Depot, and we wanted to find a galvanized bucket with a lid to store the birdseed in, and another one to dump ashes from the grill. Home Depot had no such animal. I can't understand why a galvanized pail with a lid isn't available everywhere, but so it goes.

When we got home, we found an old pail that would do for the ashes. I noticed some critter had already eaten a hole in the birdseed bag, and the floor of the garage was littered with sunflower seed hulls. The cats have been spending lots of time in the garage, even Thisbe, who parked herself in front of the firewood. So a critter had moved in and helped himself to the birdseed.

While I was looking for a container to dump the birdseed into, Thisbe took off Out of The Garage about 30 MPH, across the lawn to the neighbor's deck. This is unheard of. She never ventures off the porch. Whatever she was chasing, most likely a chipmunk, got away and she discovered she was not in the friendly confines of the front porch or the back deck or the garage. Panic. Tail becomes the size of a baseball bat. I walk over and talk her back to the garage, but she decides it's safer to come in the front door. Tail still huge and fur standing up. Horrors! What came over me? she seems to be saying. My god, what was I thinking of?

We are having a homebody kind of Labor Day. I go to Gerlach in a week and have stuff to do that I have been postponing at home. The icky kind of office work that you really don't ever feel like doing. Indefinitely postponed. Got to get it taken care of.

Last night I wrote the first three paragraphs of Bad Trip, and found the notes I had made about the incident at the Oakland Motel. They read: (desk clerk speaking to very attractive young lady) "He asked, 'what room is the chick with the weird name in?' He saw you check in."
The girl became panicky and checked out immediately and left in a big black car. Hmmm. So what was that all about? It will work in my story.

Now I am off to eat that cold steak and the leftover almond dessert. Life is good. The Red Sox rookie pitched a supremely memorable game last night, a no-hitter. Glad we were home. Glad we weren't watching a movie. Fun and exciting to see the triumph of such a nice young pitcher. Great baseball moment. What a thrill for the folks at Fenway Park.

Onward

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