What better way than to wake up in the morning from the aroma of this Cherry Ripple Sour Cream Coffee Cake...

Jeff has been asking when I was going to make another treat for us to have at home (meaning he didn't want to share with anyone else!), so I thought I should get something in the oven this morning. To take advantage of the fresh cherries in the market before they get outrageously expensive again, I started working on this Cherry Ripple Sour Cream Coffee Cake before he even crawled out of bed!

Before I started mixing the batter for the cake, I needed to toss together a nutty streusel - this is a mixture of white whole-wheat flour, hearty rolled oats, brown sugar, toasted pecans and generous pinch of fragrant cinnamon. To moisten the mixture, forming tasty nuggets, canola oil and orange juice concentrate are drizzled in. It should be crumbly and hold together if you squished it between your fingers, but it shouldn't be too wet.

To give the cake a little buttery flavor, yet up the health factor, the fat used for the batter is just a couple tablespoons of melted butter that we mixed with canola oil instead. We also cut the all-purpose flour with whole-wheat pastry flour as we usually do. When you add the dry ingredients into the wet, you will be alternating it with sour cream to add a tender crumb and keep the cake quite moist. This process just allows the batter to stay cohesive and smooth through the whole mixing process. Once combined, the batter is then studded with chunky pieces of those fresh sweet cherries. Because the sweet streusel mixture is quite generous, it is actually layered in the middle of the cake, along with the finishing sprinkle on top.

I didn't notice the original recipe called for a 9" tube pan until I went to spray it, but all I have is a 10" and I wasn't about to run out and pick one up for one recipe. All this did was make our cake a touch shorter and cook a bit faster - if you do have a 9" pan, you may need to increase the total baking time to about 55 minutes or so. About 15 minutes before the cake was ready, I heard a few thumps upstairs - this would be Jeff and the pup finally joining the awake world as the delicious scent reached the bed and acted as a leash, pulling them down to see what smelled so darn good. Too bad for them though, they were none too happy to find that the cake still needed a few minutes to finish and then had to cool down! No, I wasn't secretly laughing at this point or anything... hee hee!

The golden cake itself was tender and moist while the cherries were plentiful and juicy. The streusel was a nice hidden surprise layered inside the cake as well as being on top - I did find that it was a little tough getting nice cuts as that streusel on top got in the way a few times. If you don't have orange juice concentrate, I would have no problem using the same volume of fresh orange juice along with a bit of the zest from said orange.

Recipes
Cherry Ripple Sour Cream Coffee Cake