Cranberry Sauce Coffee Cake

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to eat healthier, which at this point means eating more veggies, drinking more water, reducing sugar intake, and replacing refined flours and grains with whole flours and grains whenever possible. Wish me luck! :D

For my very first baking attempt for the year, I decided to make King Arthur Flour’s Yogurt-Cranberry Coffeecake recipe (seeing that I still had some homemade cranberry sauce leftover, which is simply too precious to waste). Of course, as usual I made little changes to the original recipe (because where’s the fun in following everything exactly, right? *grin*) – instead of almond extract, I used lemon zest to add a subtle lemon flavor to the cake, and in addition, I substituted sour cream for the yogurt (just because I have a huge tub of sour cream that I got from Costco that I really need to use up). With my New Year’s resolution in mind, the decision to use whole wheat flour instead of the refined all-purpose flour was a no-brainer as well (do you know that white whole wheat flour has the same nutritional value as the regular whole wheat flour? Source: Whole Grains Council).

And in my attempt to be slightly fancy, :D I decided to bake the cake in a bundt pan instead of a 9″ x 13″ baking dish, which in hindsight, does not seem like such a great idea after all. Baking the coffee cake in a bundt pan took longer (55 minutes) versus the 40 minutes in the 9″ x 13″ baking dish, which resulted in a slightly drier (but still really delicious) cake. So note to self, if I ever attempt to bake this cake in the bundt pan again, I would probably increase the amount of sour cream/yogurt by another ½ cup to accommodate the extra baking time.

2 cups white whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest (from 1 large lemon)
½ cup butter (1 stick), softened
⅔ cup packed light brown sugar
2 extra-large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sour cream
1 cup whole-berry cranberry sauce (homemade or canned)

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Lightly grease a 9″ x 13″ pan (or if you decide to use a bundt pan, butter and flour the pan). In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar until light and smooth.  Beat in the eggs one at a time and the vanilla, again until smooth, scraping the bowl as needed. Add the flour mixture and sour cream alternately, beginning and ending with the flour, mixing until just combined (the batter will be stiff).

Scoop batter into prepared pan (9″ x 13″) and dollop the cranberry sauce on top (breaking it up with a fork first if necessary). If using bundt pan, scoop ⅔ of the batter in the pan. Use the back of a wet spoon to create a shallow valley in the batter and place ⅔ of the cranberry sauce in it. Cover the sauce with the rest of the batter, smoothing the batter, again with the back of a wet spoon. Spread the rest of the cranberry sauce on top, pressing the sauce slightly into the batter.

Bake for 40 minutes for the 9″ x 13″ and 55 minutes for the bundt pan or until a cake tester comes out clean. Remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack. If using the bundt pan, I do remove the cake from the pan after 10 minutes and place the cake directly on a cooling rack to cool completely. Enjoy with coffee or tea! :D