Tag: Baking

Easy cheesecake in a pressure cooker

If you follow the world of electric pressure cookers, like the Instant Pot and similar devices, you will perhaps have heard of the idea of making cheesecake in your pot. While this sounds a bit crazy, there is a really good reason to give it a try: uniformity. Cheesecakes can be difficult to make without over-baking them, leading to cracked, dry cake that people leave on their plate.

Making a smooth, creamy cheesecake is not just the province of expert bakers: you just need clear, repeatable instructions. There is an AllRecipes.com page on the details of making cheesecake, suggesting a water bath for uniform heating and cautioning you not to succumb to lower-fat cream cheese, that doesn’t have sufficient fat to set up properly.

You can also find a very nice cheesecake recipe here, but it requires that you leave the cake in the closed oven for 6 hours after baking at low temperature, followed by chilling in the refrigerator.

We decided to try out making a cheese cake following the fairly standard recipe and procedures given by Jill Selkowitz, who writes an excellent, if somewhat prolix, blog under the name ThisOldGal. So, this is her New York Cheesecake recipe with reduced discussion (but not reduced fat). This recipe is quite simple and you can do it in about 45 minutes. You still have to chill the cheesecake for several hours or overnight, though, so it is firm enough to cut.

To bake a cheesecake in the InstantPot or any of its cousins, you need a small spring form or drop bottom cake pan. We bought a Kaiser Noblesse 7” springform pan at our local kitchen store, so we could make sure it fits. The actual pan base is about 7”, but the interior of the pan only 6 ½ “.

For the crust, we used Nilla wafers, but you could use graham crackers or any kind of cookies you like.

The Crust

24 Nilla wafer cookies (about ¾ cup when crushed)
1 tsp sugar
2 ½ Tb butter, melted

The Filling

16 oz full fat cream cheese (2 8 oz packages)at room temperature
½ cup sugar
2 tsp flour
½ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp grated lemon peel
½ tsp grated orange peel
2 eggs, at room temperature
1 egg yolk at room temperature
¼ cup heavy cream

Top Layer

½ cup sour cream
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp sugar

Melt the butter in a microwave for a minute at 50% power.
Chop up the Nilla wafers in a food processor or blender. Add the butter, and process until smooth.

3. Butter the inside of the spring form pan and press the crumbs to the bottom and sides of the pan so they go up the sides and inch or even two. Put the pan in the freezer for 15 minutes to solidify the crust.

4. Wipe out the food processor, and add the cream cheese, cut into 1-2” pieces. Add the sugar, flour and vanilla.

5. Grate the lemon and orange peel into the processor bowl using a microplane grater (or any other sort of grater). Pulse until smooth.

6. Add the eggs and egg yolk and pulse until again smooth.

7. Add the cream and fold in with a rubber spatula.

8. Remove the pan from the freezer and pour in the filling.

9. Cover the pan with a layer of paper towel to prevent water from soaking in, and then with aluminum foil.

10. Put the trivet in the bottom of the Instant Pot and pour 1 ½ cups water.

11. Make a sling of some aluminum foil (we used heavy duty foil) so you can lift the hot pan out after cooking. Put the sling in the pot and put the cheesecake pan on top of it.

12. Close the pot and cook at high pressure for 37 minutes. Allow the pressure to subside for about 15 minutes (normal release) and open the pot.

13. Lift out the baked cheesecake and unwrap it. If there is any water on the cheesecake surface, dab If dry with a paper towel.

14. Immediately spread the sour cream topping over the hot cheesecake, so it incorporates itself into the cheesecake. The cake may still be jiggly in the middle but will set up on standing and cooling. Let the cake cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

15. Chill for 4-5 hours or overnight.

Serve with berries dotted with whipped cream.

Delicious hot yeast dinner rolls

rolls-in-basket For Thanksgiving, or any special celebration, it is great fun to bring our piping hot, just baked yeast dinner rolls. You can make these in a bit more than 2 hours rising time, but the preparation time is only about 10 minutes total.

Making dinner rolls sounds like a lot of work, but in our house they are something everyone looks forward to for major holidays, birthdays and other celebrations. Kids like to taste a bit of the dough, and enjoy helping roll out the dough and cutting it, so it becomes a family affair!

There really is nothing better than these soft just-risen and baked dinner rolls, and this recipe is one of the most popular ones we know. It is really simple to make, using a food processor to replace the usual kneading step.

1/2 cup lukewarm water
1/2 tsp sugar
1 package yeast (not rapid rise)
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup shortening
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
3-4 cups flour
3 Tb butter

Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water and stir in the 1/2 tsp of sugar. Let the yeast proof for a couple of minutes until it starts to foam.
Put the milk, sugar and shortening in a glass pitcher and microwave for one minute. The shortening does not need to melt completely.
Put one cup of flour into a food processor and add the warm milk mixture. Be sure to scrape in any remaining sugar or shortening.
Pulse briefly until mixed.
Add the yeast mixture and the egg and pulse the food processor until the mixture is uniform.
Add about 2 cups more flour and mix until smooth. The dough should be smooth and no longer sticky. If it is still sticky, add more flour a little at a time until it is no longer sticky.
Allow the dough to rise for about an hour, until doubled in bulk.
Melt the 3 Tb butter in the microwave for 30-45 seconds.
Remove the dough from the food processor and pat into a single mass on a floured board.
Roll out the dough about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick and cut into circles with a large drinking glass or biscuit cutter.
Dip each circle in the melted butter and fold into quarters.
Place each folded circle into a muffin pan.
When the rolls are all formed, cover with a damp towel and allow to rise about an hour.
Preheat the oven to 375 º F.
Bake the rolls for about 10 minutes until light to medium brown.
Brush each roll with some of the remaining melted butter, place in a bowl and serve.

Stand back, these will go fast.

We have found that yeast packets on supermarket shelves are really variable in activity and some proof and bubble hardly at all. So we are now buying yeast in jars and keeping it in the refrigerator once opened. It is much more lively that way.

Enjoy your rolls!

Outrageous Halloween cake with candy layers

For Halloween we decided to make a cake out of pure junk. While the cake layers are actual brownies, the middle is Halloween candy bars. We used Reese’s Peanutbutter Cups and Mounds Bars. The icing is mostly Marshmallow Fluff. We also used some chocolate frosting in the bottom filling, which you could make or buy. We made our brownies from scratch, since the recipe is as fast as making boxed brownies but you can make them either way or bust buy them. The recipes are at the bottom of the article. TO spread Marshmallow Fluff, it needs to be a bit warm, so warm it in a pan of hot water, or under a warming lamp, or briefly in a microwave.

You will need 3 layers of brownies to make this cake. Two of ours were normal chocolate brownies and one was a butterscotch brownie recipe, both with added chocolate chips.

3 brownie recipes baked in round pans
10 Reese’s peanut butter cups
1 cup chocolate frosting
½ cup peanuts
Marshmallow fluff
13-14 small Mounds bars
10 candy kisses
½ cup chocolate ganache (optional)

Chocolate brownie layer

Spread frosting on brownie

Spread the bottom brownie layer with chocolate frosting.
Arrange about 10 Reese’s cups on the top, cutting a few in half so they will nest more closely.

3. Add about ½ cup of peanuts between the Reese’s cups.
4. Spread the bottom of a second brownie layer with Marshmallow Fluff and set it on top of the Reese’s cup layer.

5. Spread the top of that brownie layer with more fluff.
6. Arrange 13 or 14 Mounds bars on top.

7. Spread the bottom of a third layer with more fluff and place on top of the Mounds.
8. Spread more fluff on top and arrange about 10 Hershey’s kisses around the edge.

9. Pour a little warmed chocolate ganache on top (shown at top of article).
10. Chill the cake until ready to serve. Do no freeze as it will toughen the brownies.

Serve very small slices as this is ridiculously rich. It was, however, well received at a rehearsal break by a tribe of hungry actors.

Chocolate brownies

¼ cup butter
2 oz unsweetened chocolate
2 eggs
¼ tsp salt
½ cup flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup chocolate chips
½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 325° F. Melt the butter in microwave for 1 minute at 50% power, and the chocolate for 1.25 minutes at high power, or in a double boiler. Mix together in a bowl and stir in the sugar and eggs, and mix. Add the flour and salt and mix. Stir in the chocolate chips and optional nuts. Pour into a greased, round cake pan, lined with baking parchment. Bake 30-35 minutes until the top is dry to the touch. Remove from the pan when cooled and cover until you a ready to use it.

Butterscotch brownies

¼ cup melted butter (in the microwave at 50% power)
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
¾ cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla
½ cup chocolate chips
½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 ° F. Mix the butter, sugar and egg with a wire whisk in a bowl until fluffy. Add the salt, baking powder and vanilla and mix until smooth. Fold in the chocolate chips and nuts. Pour the batter into a greased round cake pan, lined with baking parchment. Bake for about 25 minutes. Unmold when cool.

Chocolate frosting

½ stick butter (2 oz)
½ lb confectioner’s sugar
2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted
3-5 Tb milk

Add the butter and sugar to a food processor and process until mixed. Add the milk a Tb at a time until you have a smooth, spreadable icing. Pour in the melted chocolate and process until smooth.

Chocolate ganache

1 cup heavy cream
¼ lb semisweet chocolate chips
2 Tb honey

Bring the cream snf honry to a boil and pour over the chocolate chips in a bowl. Let stand 5 minutes. Whisk until uniform. Let stand until ganache stiffens. If you are not using it soon, refrigerate. You can rewarm it under a warming lamp or very briefly in the microwave.

One bowl Quiche Lorraine

This simplified quiche recipe can almost be made in a single bowl. OK, you have to fry 3 strips of bacon, too, and probably will use a pitcher to fill the piecrust, but the crust and the filling can all be made in the food processor. And you don’t even have to rinse it out between ingredients! You can have this quiche done in less than an hour including baking the piecrust.

Piecrust

2 cups flour
2/3 cup shortening
2/3 cup (or less) cold water
Aluminum foil
Dry beans for weight

This amount of dough is more than you need: it makes two piecrusts, but since a quiche pan is bigger than one pie pan, we just make two and use the remaining dough for something else.

Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Put the 2 cups of flour in the food processor and add the shortening. Pulse briefly.
Add 1/3 cup of water and pulse briefly.
Add some of the remaining water and pulse until mixed. If the dough is not smooth, add just a bit more water. The dough should be the consistency of Play-Doh.
Roll out about ¾ of the dough to a circle larger than the quiche pan, fold it in half, and fit it into the quiche pan. Pinch it into place, and cut away any excess dough.
Prick the dough in a few places with a fork.
Put a sheet of aluminum foil over the piecrust and fill it with dried beans to weight down the crust.
Bake 8-9 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and bake 2 more minutes.

Quiche filling

In this method, we create the filling but do not fill the pie shell until we have it sitting in the oven. This prevents the filling from slopping over into the oven when you put the pie in.

3 strips bacon, fried and drained
4 oz Swiss cheese (Emmentaler or Jarlsberg)
3 eggs
1 ½ cups light cream
Chopped chives or green onions

Reduce oven heat to 375°F
Put the cheese in the food processor and grate it with the steel blade.
Add the eggs and cream and pulse until mixed.
Cut the bacon into small pieces and place on the crust.
Pour the quiche filling into a 2 cup pitcher, making sure to get all the cheese
Place the quiche pan on a pulled-out oven rack, and pour as much of the quiche filling as you can into the pie shell.

7. Top with the chopped chives or onions, close the oven and bake for about 30 minutes, until a knife blade comes out clean.

Remove the quiche from the oven, make sure the crust is free of the pan rim and place the quiche pan on top of a cup or jar and press downwards to drop the sides of the pan. Place the quiche on a platter and serve at once.

5 Reasons High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Kill You

An article by Mark Hyman, MD with the above title has been broadly distributed across the Internet: you can easily find dozens of copies. If I go down to my local Stop and Shop and buy, say, Coca-Cola, with HFCS in it, am I killing myself? Nonsense! Hyman’s article is full of basic scientific errors as well as substantial errors of fact. What he has written is sensational, but utterly wrong.

While Hyman is indeed a physician, he is not a research scientist, and he has gone deeply into something called “functional medicine,” which is the sort of woo you find on alternative medicine sites like imaginewellnesscentre.com.

Alternative medicine is a collection of things we don’t know work and things we know don’t work.

Functional medicine is not science-based medicine. Further, Hyman’s web site is a vehicle for him to peddle pills, books and supplements; he is certainly not the sort of physician we would recommend anyone consult, since many of his ideas are nonsense.

Hyman’s shrill article accusing the Corn Manufacturer’s Association of “deception,” a “misinformation campaign,” and “twisted sweet lies.” Not exactly a sober scientific report! In fact, it contains only two scientific references, one of them discredited and the other retracted.

Hyman starts out in his preamble claiming that HFCS is a major cause of heart disease, obesity, cancer, dementia, liver failure, tooth decay, “and more.” The only links are to other articles of his, none of which even mention HFCS.

Major errors

Here are some of the errors in the major points in his article:

He claims that HFCS is an industrial food product extracted from corn by a process so secret that ADM and Cargill (which he misspells) would not allow author Michael Pollan to observe. Rubbish! The details of HFCS production have been known for years, and are readily available, even on Wikipedia. The details of a specific industrial process may indeed be secret, but this is true throughout the consumer products industry.
He calls the result a chemically and biologically novel compound, when as he admits one paragraph later, it is just of mixture of glucose and fructose. It is not a compound and hardly novel.
HFCS contains contaminants including mercury. This is based on a discredited undergraduate paper we’ve discussed before. They did find traces of mercury in HFCS: but only the traces you’d expect to occur naturally.
When HFCS is run through a chemical analyzer (a what?) or gas chromatograph “strange chemical peaks” show up that are not glucose or fructose. Maybe the technician that did this work didn’t know what these peaks were, but nowadays gas chromatographs are routinely coupled with mass spectrometers, and identification of each peak is not difficult. We have no idea what a “chemical analyzer is,” (nor does Hyman) but reporting that someone cannot identify a peak from a gc is simply silly.
He credits Barry Popkin for suggesting that metabolism of glucose and fructose differ and this may contribute to obesity. In fact, Popkin did not say that. In an interview in the NY Times, he said this was an hypothesis “meant to spur on further research.” And in this same article, Prof Walter Willet, chairman of the nutrition department at Harvard made it clear that:

There’s no substantial evidence to support the idea that high-fructose corn syrup is somehow responsible for obesity.

HFCS is almost always a marker of poor-quality, nutrition-poor disease creating industrial food products. Poor quality foods, perhaps, but HFCS is used by bakers and candy makers who make high-quality products as well. And as far as “disease creating,” this is in no way established.
Shocking new evidence on how HFCS can trigger body wide inflammation and obesity. This statement is based on a lunch meeting with Dr Bruce Ames. Unfortunately, there are no papers published on this by Ames anyone at his research center. This seems to be pure hyperbole.

The idea that a solution of fructose and glucose is processed differently by the body than a solution of sucrose (table sugar) has had a lot of discussion, both by Hyman and others, but thus far there is no evidence for it. There is an interesting hypothesis begin generated in this area that we learned about in a phone conference with Dr Mark Shigenaga, who is in the same research group as Bruce Ames. Here is a recent paper on his work.However it is contradicted in a critical review by Stanhope.

The amount of heat any discussion of HFCS continues to generate is astonishing considering how little actual research there is in this area. Hyman’s scare article does nothing to improve the situation.

Related papers

5 Reasons HFCS Can Kill You (Hyman’s version)
Science-based medicine : functional medicine
HFCS, the myths continue
A sweetener with a bad rap (NY Times)
Consumption of HFCS may lead to obesity (Popkin and Bray)

Blueberry breakfast cake – from King Arthur

This is a report on making the Blueberry Breakfast Cake recipe sent around recently by King Arthur Flour. It’s a simple one bowl recipe, but you have to bake it in a fairly deep 8” or 9” cake pan, since it comes out somewhere between a soufflé and a cheesecake. And while it isn’t really quick since the baking time is 50 minutes and the cooling time at least 15, it is really delicious.

Here are their ingredients:

3 large eggs
heaping 1/2 cup sugar
6 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup part-skim ricotta
1 cup sour cream (low-fat is fine)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cupKing Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen
cinnamon-sugar mixture, for topping

All you do is mix the eggs and sugar and add the butter, and then mix in the ricotta, sour cream and vanilla extract.

Then you mix in the flour, salt, and baking powder and pour into the baking pan.

Ideally you would like an 8 or 9” spring form pan so you can get the cake out easily, but lacking that we used a 3” deep 9” cake pan lined with parchment paper all up the sides so we could grab the corners to lift the cake out.

You sprinkle the blueberries over the top and bake for 50 minutes at 350° F.

Then you take the cake out, sprinkle it with the cinnamon-sugar mixture, and let it cool a bit. When it is very hot it is pretty fragile and would be hard to cut. After 15 minutes we peeled off the sides of the baking parchment and sliced it into wedges. It was still warm and delicious.

Our only suggestion is that since the blueberries were pretty sour, and we’d probably increase the sugar next time.

The idea that this serves 8-10 is a canard. Two of us were hungry after waiting for it that long and devoured half of it.

King Arthur also suggests small curd cottage cheese as a substitute for the ricotta. That seemed a little weird, and we bought a small container of ricotta when we bought the blueberries.

This is a great recipe and we’ll surely be making it again. But not for a big crowd!

Zucchini bread: make four loaves at a time

Zucchini bread is a delicious breakfast or snack and an ideal use for those “garden tumors” that start coming to a fruition with a vengeance this time of year. Making these great loaves isn’t very difficult, but it can get a lot of dishes dirty.

We set out to show how you can double the usual recipe, and make four loaves at a time. If you have a stand mixer and a food processor for chopping, you can make up the batter for the bread in about 10 minutes and have the loaves in hand an hour later. The order of steps in this recipe tries to optimize use of the food processor and mixer.

If you have a 5 quart stand mixer, you may want to use the plastic splash guard to keep the bowl from overflowing. If you have a 6 quart stand mixer, spilling over is much less likely: just start the mixer at low speed and then slowly increase it.

2 cups pecans or walnuts
2 medium or 1 large zucchini
8 eggs
4 cups sugar
2 cups vegetable oil
7 cups flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3 tsp vanilla
2 cups raisins
4 loaf pins
Nonstick spray

Preheat the oven to 350 F

2. Chop the nuts in the food processor and set aside.

3. Using a shredding disk, shred the zucchini until you have more than 4 cups of zucchini.

4. Break the eggs into the mixing bowl of the stand mixer.

5. Add the sugar and mix.

6. Add the oil and mix.

7. Add the flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and baking powder and mix very slowly until the flour is taken up into the batter, then increase the speed and mix until uniform.

8. Take a fistful of shredded zucchini at a time and wring it out to remove excess water and add to a 2 cup pitcher until full. Add to the batter.

9. Repeat with 2 more cups of zucchini.

10. Slowly mix the zucchini into the batter. Some stand mixers have a collar to prevent splashing over. You can use it if you want, but if you mix things in slowly it should all fit.

11. Add the raisins and nuts and mix until uniform.

12. Spray the loaf pans with the nonstick spray.

13. Divide the batter among the four pans and bake for 55-60 minutes at 350.

14.The loaves are done with a toothpick comes out clean.

15. Cool and remove from the pans.

These loaves freeze very well. We generally wrap each in foil and then place in a plastic zipper bag to prevent them drying out in the freezer.

During peak zucchini season, we usually make this recipe 3-4 times and have bread for the whole year.

A neat trick for dividing up the batter

Getting the batter evenly divided among the four loaf pans is a little harder than it seems and since the batter is lumpy, it is hard to eyeball.

Instead, we weighed the empty mixing bowl (ours weighed 1014 g) and then weighed the batter-filled bowl. (You can use the Tare button to zero the scale with the empty bowl on it.) It weighed 4792 g, making the contents weigh 3778 g. Thus, dividing by 4, each loaf pan should get 944 g of batter.

So we put each loaf pan on the scale, pressed the Tare button to zero it, and spooned in about 944 g of batter. This worked way better than we’ve ever been able to to by estimating, and we’ve been baking these for years.

Your kitchen scale is your friend!

Terrific blueberry muffins without foil wrappers

These rich and delicious muffins get their flavor from all the butter in the recipe, and they are irresistible. The recipe is a variation on one taken from the Williams Sonoma Muffin Book.

In this version, we line our muffin pan with 5” squares of parchment paper. This gives you muffin papers that do not stick to either the pan or the baked muffin. The muffins also make much more uniformly, and do not have soggy bottoms. And they are easy to reheat in the microwave, since there is no aluminum foil muffin cup.

Topping

1/4 cup flour
2 Tb granulated sugar
2 Tb light brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 Tb cold, unsalted butter, cut into small pieces.

Stir together the flour, sugars and cinnamon. Cut in the butter, using a pastry blender, or use a food processor briefly.

Muffins

7 Tb unsalted butter at room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
2 Tb flour

Preheat the oven to 375º F.

In an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each egg.

Stir together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Add the dry ingredients into the butter mixture, alternating with the milk.

Stir in the vanilla.

Toss the blueberries with 2 Tb of flour, so they won’t sink to the bottom.

Fold in the blueberries, taking care not to break them too much. If you use frozen blueberries, let them thaw and drain before adding them.

Line a muffin pan with 5” squares of parchment paper. The trick is to use a small can or jar to force the paper liner to the bottom of each muffin cup. Hold the paper in place on its left side while you spoon the batter into each muffin cup with your right hand, using a cookie scoop or small measuring cup. Once you have some batter in each muffin cup, it will hold the parchment down, and you can add more batter to even them out.

Batter in parchment

Topping added

Fresh bake muffins

Sprinkle the topping on each muffin using a spoon or your fingers.

Bake until golden, about 25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Check instructions if baking in the machine (more details at www.village-bakery.com).

Let cool for 5 minutes before lifting the muffins out and serving them. You can just pick up each muffin by the corner of its parchment square. It won’t stick to the pan, and the paper peels off neatly without sticking to the muffin!

Eat them hot!

Buttermilk biscuits in 15 minutes

There’s really not much to making buttermilk biscuits, and they make a great breakfast by themselves or with eggs. You probably have all the ingredient on hand. If you don’t have any buttermilk, you can make your own in 5 minutes using milk and lemon juice or vinegar, as they show here.

To make your biscuits, heat your oven to 450° F, and mix up the dough while the oven heats.

2 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1/3 cup shortening or butter
1 cup buttermilk

Mix the flour, baking powder, soda and salt in a medium bowl.

2. Add the shortening and cut in with a pastry blender or two forks.

3. Add the buttermilk and mix briefly with a fork.

4. Combine the down better using your hands.

5. Roll out the down about ¾ inch thick.

6. Cut into biscuits using a cookie cutter or a drinking glass.

7. Place the biscuits on an ungreased cookie sheet, and bake for 10 minutes at 450° F.

Remove from the oven and serve hot, with plenty of butter.

Sour cream coffeecake for breakfast

You can make this delicious coffee cake in about 8 minutes work time and 30 minutes baking. The result is great just a few minutes out of the oven. Warm coffeecake with a slightly melted brown sugar topping. Add the nuts or not as you like.

The coffeecake

1 ½ cups sifted flour (Easier to weigh out 189 grams.)
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp melted butter
1 egg
¾ cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
1 tsp vanilla
Brown sugar topping
½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Preheat the oven to 375° F.
Weigh out 189 g of flour: no need to sift it. ( A cup of sifted flour weighs 126g, so 1 ½ cups weighs 189 g)
Mix the baking powder, soda and salt into the flour and stir it a bit.
Melt the butter in the microwave for 1 minute at 50% power.
In a mixing bowl, add the egg, melted butter and sugar and mix with a whisk
Add the sour cream and vanilla and mix.
Add the flour mixture and mix until uniform.
Spray a 9” square pan with cooking spray and pour in the batter.
Decorate with topping and nuts.
Bake at 375° F for about 30 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.
Allow the coffeecake to cool for 5 minutes, and then cut into 9 squares. Lift out and serve.