Time for Cinnamon Cake

Show Some Love

Come early November I start cleaning out my freezer. No more cooking big batches of chili and freezing the leftovers. No more buying pork tenderloins on sale and stashing them for later or roasting a chicken then making and freezing the stock. I plan menus around what I already have frozen.

It’s not about a clean slate for a new year. It’s about making room for my holiday bake-fest.

Come December each year I bake scores of batches of cookies and holiday cakes to bring to parties and give as gifts; if I don’t bake ahead and freeze some I’d never keep up. I didn’t have to do that this time around. No parties to attend. Most of my gift exchanges suspended. A sadly diminished holiday in this age of Covid.

So getting an invitation from my friends Deborah and Geoff to visit them in the Catskills, where they have been safely weathering the vicissitudes of the pandemic, meant, among other things, I’d have a chance to bake for somebody.

Every season I try to bake something new (another tradition that’s gone with the corona wind) and I was glad for the chance to resurrect it. Since Geoff is a big fan of coffee cake and I’ve never made one, I decided to bake one for him. It may not offer the challenge of, say, a Bûche de Noël, but give me a break, it’s been a tough year.

As I browsed coffee cake recipes, I found some with the note “Best served the day it’s made.” Maybe I was taking this too literally, but I wanted something that would still be good if I made it ahead. I turned to one of my most reliable sources: Lake Isle Press’s vintage baking bible, “Jim Fobel’s Old-Fashioned Baking Book.” Though each of his coffee cake recipes notes that it should be served warm, I hoped that if they were made in advance and would respond well to a gentle reheat.

I chose Jim’s cinnamon cake because I thought it would travel best (not to mention it would use up some leftover sour cream). I wanted it to be as fresh as possible, so I got up early the morning I left for the Catskills and made it.

I followed the recipe to the letter with two small deviations: I subbed in some lovely macadamia nuts in place of pecans, and topped it with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar.