Cranberry Coffee Cake * how to make substitute buttermilk

Cranberry Coffee Cake

1/2 c. half and half

1 tsp lemon juice

2 c. flour

1 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 c. butter

1 c. sugar

1 egg

3/4 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 tsp almond extract

2 c. frozen cranberries (do not thaw), plus a few handfuls more for topping

2 Tbsp turbinado sugar or other large-crystal sugar

Grease and flour 9x9 pan. Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix half and half with lemon juice and set aside. (You can substitute 1/2 cup buttermilk for the half-and-half/lemon juice mixture.)

In a medium bowl, mix flour with salt and baking powder and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add egg and extracts. Mix well, then add flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the milk mixture. Fold in 2 c. cranberries last. Spoon into prepared pan and top with reserved cranberries and turbinado sugar. Bake about 45 minutes. Cool in pan about 15 minutes before turning out.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make cranberry coffee cake. The whole reason I’m cooking with cranberries in May is because I discovered a bag of frozen cranberries in the freezer the other day, left over from fall. I found this recipe to use them up without needing to thaw them. If I had more frozen cranberries I’d tinker with the recipe and try to get it to work in a loaf pan, but it’s quite good as it is.

For this recipe you’ll need a 9x9 pan, two large mixing bowls or one large and one medium, and a small bowl. This makes it sound complicated but it’s actually not.

First, turn the oven on to preheat. Then grease and flour the pan. The initial recipe just said to grease it, but you’ll get a better result if you grease and flour it the way you would for a cake. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out the zucchini pineapple bread episode from August of 2019.

Next, measure the half and half into the small bowl. This can be a cereal bowl; it doesn’t have to be big to hold half a cup of milk. Add the lemon juice and stir it in. Basically what you’re doing here is making substitute buttermilk, so if you happen to have buttermilk on hand, you can use it instead of the half and half and lemon juice. Ordinarily a recipe that calls for buttermilk or its substitute also calls for baking soda, because soda neutralizes the acids in foods like buttermilk, but in this case those acids give a lovely sour flavor to the bread that goes well with the citrusy flavor of the cranberries.

Set the milk mixture aside. You may notice it getting kind of weird and clumpy-looking, but that’s fine. The lemon juice curdles the milk slightly, giving it the acidic tang you want.

Next, measure the flour, baking powder, and salt into a medium or large mixing bowl. Whisk it well or blend it with a fork, then set it aside too.

Next, cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl until it’s light and fluffy, then add the eggs and extracts. If you don’t have almond extract, you can use a full teaspoonful of vanilla, but almond really brings out the flavor of the cranberries.

Now you just need to add the flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the milk mixture, just as you would for an ordinary cake. The batter will be thicker than cake batter, more like cookie dough. Once it’s blended, you need to fold in the cranberries.

Until now, you should have the cranberries in the freezer. You don’t want them to thaw out because they need to remain frozen until they’re in the oven. Measure them out now and toss them on top of the batter, but then—and this is important—mix them in as quickly as possible. You don’t need to be caref