Cranberry Coffee Cake

I remember often having coffee cake before the morning session of conference, so I thought this would be a good choice for breakfast this morning. The recipe was written on one side of those tiny Nor-Am (or was it AgrEvo?) notebook papers, so it doesn't have a separate ingredient list. I'm just going to type it as written.

Cranberry Coffee Cake

Blend 3/4 c butter w/ 1 c sugar. Add 1 c sour cream and 2 eggs. In separate bowl, mix 2 c flour 2 tsp baking powder. Stir into batter. Spread 1/2 batter in greased bundt pan. Top w/ 1 c. cranberry sauce. Top w/ remaining batter. Swirl. Bake 350 degrees - 40-45 min.

There were some issues. Yet again, I just realized that I failed to read the directions correctly. It says 1 c. cranberry sauce, and I put in 1 can, which is probably more like 2 cups. Oops. That mistake is kind of reminiscent of the strawberry bread disaster, but I don't think that is why this coffee cake had problems. The taste and texture were actually very good. The problem was that the batter was the consistency of cookie dough, so I basically had to press it into the pan. That made it difficult to put the second layer of batter on top of the cranberry sauce, and it was near impossible to swirl. So when I took it out of the oven and tried to flip it out onto a plate, there really wasn't much binding the top layer and the bottom layer of batter together. The top layer came out first, covered in cranberry sauce, then I had to loosen the bottom layer and lay it over the part that already came out. It made for horrible presentation, but it still tasted just fine.

Overall the taste was good, the ingredients were relatively normal (I specially bought the cranberry sauce), and I liked the sweet cake mixed with the tart cranberry.  In my opinion it's worth making. I think Brian liked it, but I always have to convince him that coffee cake is okay to eat and doesn't have coffee in it. Maybe it could be put into a different pan, so you could cut it and take out a piece rather than inverting the pan to get the cake out. And it would probably be even better with a cream cheese swirl, but most things are better with cream cheese.