Sour Cream–Applesauce Coffee Cake or Muffins

I offered up a streamlined version of one of my favorite coffee cakes in my Twice as Tasty column this week for the Flathead Beacon. The simplified recipe is easy to make with store-bought ingredients, many of which you probably already have in your kitchen. It’s also easy to pour the batter into a muffin pan and bake it into muffins.

Both shapes have their pluses and minuses. It’s attractive as a coffee cake for a group brunch, especially if you bake it in a springform pan, which makes it easy to release and shows off the streusel layers as you cut and serve it at the table. But that shape may be less ideal for an outdoor gathering or if the coffee cake will be eaten over several days at home. That’s when muffins make sense: They’re more informal but easy to eat on the go and keep well in the fridge or freezer. With either shape, you can upgrade my streamlined recipe by using scratch-made ingredients, like Homemade Sour Cream.

Learn more about baking with sour cream and get the complete recipe for Sour Cream–Applesauce Coffee Cake in my column.

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Twice as Tasty

Homemade yogurt, sour cream, and cheese often cost less and taste better than store-bought versions. Because my home-fermented sour cream has far more tang than its commercial counterpart, I spoon less of it onto nachos or baked potatoes, so I’ve convinced myself that I’m saving on calories too.

While I’m not about to argue that Sour Cream–Applesauce Coffee Cake is a health food, it does have some tricks in it that cut down on the fat even as they boost the flavor. Some of the butter is replaced by applesauce, and its natural sweetness means there’s also less sugar in the recipe. By making your own applesauce and sour cream, you have even more control over the coffee cake’s sugar and fat.

These recipes make it easy to give this coffee cake the Twice as Tasty treatment:

Homemade Sour Cream
Homemade Vanilla Extract
Grandma Tiny’s Chunky Applesauce
Sweet Spice Mix (instead of the cinnamon)

Once you have these scratch-made ingredients in your kitchen, you can use them in plenty of other baked goods. These are just a few of my favorite baking recipes that use sour cream, applesauce, or both. You can find more in the recipe index.

You can also learn more about making other homemade dairy products in this blog post.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic, a digital collection in an easy-to-read PDF format; it’s only available here.