Strawberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

 It's been ages since I posted a recipe on here. Clicking on that category, apparently it's been more than 5 years(!!) since I posted a recipe.  Waaaay too long.  I still cook, every day, from scratch, but somewhere a few years ago I lost my cooking mojo and it has been a chore rather than a fun thing.  So much so that when I list how many hours in a day I do 'work' at home, I include cooking time in the same way as washing dishes or doing laundry or mopping the floors or cleaning the bathroom.  You know, the chores.  Not the fun and relaxing stuff like reading, sewing, knitting, picking flowers to bring inside to make things pretty. . .

Every now and then I do feel a little adventurous in the kitchen, and I have added some new things to my cooking repertoire, but not like it used to be.  This recipe that I'm about to share isn't actually new.  It's really one I've had for years, but haven't actually made in several years for some reason.

Recently, however, I got the hankering for a strawberry cream cheese coffee cake.  Totally not the right time of year, in Michigan, for strawberries.  But, thanks to preplanning while they were in season, I have a stash of them down in the chest freezer (along with cherries, blueberries, rhubarb. . .)  So I didn't have to tell myself "that sounds good, but it'll have to wait for June 2024 to get here before I can make it."  Nope, I grabbed a pre-measured baggie of sliced, frozen strawberries out of the freezer and made myself a yummy coffee cake!

The recipe is an adaptation of one for Blueberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake from the 2005 edition of Taste of Home's Quick Cooking Annual Recipes.  I just swapped out strawberries for the blueberries.  It's also delicious with blueberries, and, if I remember next summer, I want to try it with mulberries too.

Strawberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

2/3 cups sugar

1/4 cup butter

1 egg

2 cups plus 2 Tbsp flour, divided

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2  cup milk

1 cup fresh or frozen strawberries (don't thaw first if you're using frozen)

3 ounces cream cheese, cut in small cubes

Topping:

2 Tbsp sugar

2 Tbsp flour

1 Tbsp cold butter

In a medium to large size bowl, cream the sugar and butter.  Beat in the egg.

In a separate, small bowl, mix the 2 cups flour, baking powder and salt.

To the larger bowl with the creamed mixture, alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk, stirring well after each addition.

In the now empty small bowl, toss the strawberries in the 2 Tbsp flour.  Add the strawberries/flour and the cream cheese to the batter in the large bowl, and fold together. Pour into a greased 8" x 8" baking dish.

Mix the topping ingredients in the again empty small bowl (like how I'm not giving you 2 extra bowls to wash by reusing the small one?) until crumbly, then sprinkle over the batter in the baking dish.

Bake in a preheated 375-degree (F) oven for 40-45 minutes until cake tests done.  Let cool slightly, then eat!

I was actually in such anticipation of that first, warm, fruity bite, that I forgot to take a picture of the finished coffee cake.  I remembered much later, after it had cooled off and doesn't look quite as mouth watering.  That's one thing you can count on at this little place here: what you see is what things actually look like; there's no staged photos or perfectly cleaned/decorated settings.  It's life in it's hectic, messy glory. If I have a coffee cake sitting on my (stained by grape juice) kitchen island that I just remembered to take a picture of, you get a probably not perfectly lit picture of a coffee cake in it's pan (missing a quarter of the cake) on my stained island.  C'est la vie.