bake 52: New York-Style Crumb Cake

I think I've shared my feelings about cake here before.  So my slight skepticism is understandable.  But, lets take this piece by piece...

We start by making the crumb topping.  Here we've got some sugar, brown sugar cinnamon, salt, some melted butter, and some cake flour.

Here it is all mixed.  Now, it would have been a lot prettier, like the one in the book, had I used dark brown sugar.  Alas, I didn't have any, and didn't feel like making a run for the store just for that.  But, it still tasted super.  Set that aside.

Here's the cake:  Whisk the flour, sugar, soda and salt together.

6 Tbls. of softened butter.

Beat the butter into the flour, one piece at a time.  It was supposed to resemble moist crumbs.  I don't know.  But that's what I got.

Then we add eggs and vanilla.

Lastly the buttermilk is added.

Beat until smooth and fluffy.

The batter is put in a pan, previously lined with a tin foil sling.

The crumb topping goes on top.  The book had detailed instructions on how the crumbs were supposed to be rolled, so that they'd stay moist.  Mine didn't end up very round... but I'm thinking that maybe the over-all shape isn't so important?

Here's the cake right from the oven.  I was supposed to dust the top with powdered sugar.  I forgot to.

Looks nice.  I'm wishing I had the dark brown sugar in that crumb topping.  The pictures in the book just look so great!

It was good.  I REALLY liked the crumb topping, and may or may not have ended up taking very shallow bites of cake, resulting in high crumb to cake ratio.  Don't judge.

Check out the full recipe on Jenn's blog.  Great pick!