Sour Cream Coffee Cake is Seriously Better Than Ever
Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter takes a classic to new heights
Are you one of the tens of thousands of fans of the Bakehouse’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake? If you are, I’m excited to share some great news: Thanks to a quality-focused collaboration between the Bakehouse and the crew at Vermont Creamery, the Coffee Cake is now on the growing list of longtime best sellers that we have recently made markedly better with Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter.
What has long been great is now notably better. To be clear, it’s still the same great Sour Cream Coffee Cake—the recipe is really unchanged. All that’s different is the big upgrade in butter quality. As we say, “You really can taste the difference!” Bakehouse staffers have been oohing and aahing about it ever since we made the butter switch a couple of weeks ago. The aroma is markedly more buttery. The flavor is richer, rounder, and even more luscious than it already was. All the same great spices, walnuts, and sour cream are all still in place, but the cultured butter seems to weave them into the mix just a bit more effectively. The finish is longer, the cake creamier!
What is cultured butter? It’s the way all good butter would have been made 150 years ago. The cream is allowed to “ripen” before being churned into butter, which means that, as with yogurt, cheese, or sourdough bread, the natural cultures develop to make the flavor fuller and more complex. Whether it’s in the Coffee Cake, spread on a couple slices of toast, or melted atop a just-cooked steak, it really is terrific!
The Sour Cream Coffee Cake itself is, of course, not a new product. Nearly 40 years ago, Ellie Marks and others would go down to the basement of the Deli each morning and butter up a few Bundt pans to prepare for the day’s business. On weekdays, we made one cake; on busy weekends, two or three. Now we make many thousands. Despite the increase in volume, I will say with certainty that the quality is far better now than it was back then. Neither Ellie nor I was especially good at baking, but the Bakehouse pastry crew is skilled, trained, and far, far more focused on their craft than we were able to be back in the early days of the Deli. Their attention to detail and many years of experience come through in the impressive consistency of the Coffee Cake!
You may have experienced the great flavors of Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter over the last couple of years at the Roadhouse. It showed up first on the Roadhouse menu’s Bakehouse bread service. Almost right off the bat, it was a huge hit! Many regulars now buy one of the one-pound tubes to take home after dinner! From there, the cultured butter began to show up in other key menu items: the Buttermilk Biscuits, the Anson Mills organic grits, the mashed potatoes, on steaks and seafood, and, most recently, in the really remarkable Butterscotch Pudding. All were already excellent, and all have been made much better by our butter improvement. As of this month, we’ve done the same with Cultured Butter Croissants, scones, Patti Pockets, and pie crusts at the Bakehouse. Each item we’ve put this butter in is markedly better than before!
If, by chance, you haven’t had any of the Bakehouse’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake lately, the cultured butter could be a compelling reason to give it a try. This coffee cake is made with lots of it, which means that it a) tastes terrific and b) lasts a really long time (without the need for any multi-syllabic, lab-produced preservatives). Add in sour cream, Indonesian Korintje cinnamon, eggs, toasted walnuts, and real vanilla, and you’ve got a great-tasting cake. Perhaps best of all, pretty much everyone who tries it likes it. Old, young, connoisseur, food novice, locals, East Coast, West Coast, in the South, in South Dakota … almost everybody adores it.
Right now, we have these cakes in good supply at the Bakeshop, Deli, Roadshow, and Coffee Company. You can buy the cakes whole, by the slice, or both. Eat a slice in the car on the way home and save the whole cake for the rest of the family. Or ship a cake to a friend—right now, everyone can use a bit of extra connection.
Collect your coffee cake
