Coffee Cake

One memory I have of childhood birthdays which sticks out is eating coffee cake at my grandmother's place on Porter street in Ashburton. While I have cooked one since coming to Iceland, I didn't have all the right ingredients or any suitable baking dishes to cook it in. As a result it turned out rather.. well, misformed, but definitely still tasty.

Now being on a CRON diet I have been hankering to bake another but unable to. Since I was going to a friend's place for dinner on what I call an "off diet" day several weekends back, I offered to cook dessert.. namely coffee cake! However, the cake I initially baked didn't rise that well. I decided to bake another and ended up with two halves which hadn't risen. So I glued them together with coffee icing and then iced over the stack ending up with this:

Needless to say it was rather heavy, something like five kilograms, but I was reassured that cakes were supposed to be pretty heavy. And it went down quite well, I wasn't the only one to have second helpings.

How could I do it better next time? Well, I have a suspicion that it makes a difference to follow the recipe and split the cake mix in two and bake two halves from that separately. It might rise better. And in any case I could pad it out with filling to make it seem larger. I recall the cakes I had at my childhood birthday having both raspberry jam and mock cream slathered between the two layers (the former then the latter).