I received this recipe about a decade ago from a gal I knew in Ohio. It was her Aunt's concoction for coffee cake or streussel.
I never left the friendship or the usership of me, but in distasteful situations, does one toss a pretty good recipe?
I decide not to as hurts do not make recipes bad, and as proof the German chocolate cake recipe I usually make for my birthday was shared with me by a former street walker in which things turned out not the best either.
As I journey among sinners, I keep what is good, stay out of evil and just shrug off the whatevers and enjoy the making of gold out of lead..........or water into wine.
I was experimenting with Jackie's coffee cake as I needed something different, and came up with this which is very good.
It is though quite exotic in I use garden huckleberries, which are some kind of African berry plant that uninformed folks claim is nightshade, but is not. I have black nightshade on my property and this garden huckleberry is not the same plant, so it is safe to eat.
It's black berries are the size of blueberries and if prepared correctly actually taste like blueberries. I will inform you how to prepare them in bit as one needs to know how to survive on things which are not poison as most things in supermarkets will make one deathly ill.
Raw the garden huckleberry tastes almost green. It smells like cucumber and in biting them you will be spitting blue juice from your mouth for quite some time. They stain wonderfully.
The huckleberry recipe is as follows, and they sprout easily from seed, just like weeds in indoor starting, and make about 4 feet tall plants, and mine did fall over.
I start with 10 cups of huckleberries, covered with a enough water to boil. After reaching a boil I pour in a third of a cup of baking soda.
Use a tall pot as the acid in the berries makes a volcanic green foam.
Cook for about 10 minutes and then carefully rinse off the berries of the soda.
It is important to do this or when you add the lemon juice in the next step, the soda will neutralize it, and you will end up with this green blue soapy tasting stuff.
Add 1/2 cup lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/3 cup water, and 3 cups sugar and an additional 1 and one half tablespoon of lemon concentrate. Let this simmer for another 20 minutes.
At this point, you can put this into pint jars for sealing like jelly or you can process at 10 pounds in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes.
In use, to a pint jar, I heat on a stove and add 3 tablespoons of flour to thicken.
You will only use a cup of this for the streussel, so freeze the rest for the next extravaganza.
Jackie's Aunt's Coffee Cake or my Huckleberry Kugel Streussel.
2 1/2 cups flour
1 3/4 cups white sugar (If you want Jackie's dark cake, use 1 cup brown sugar in this mix)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
To this add 2/3 cup olive oil. Mix it to a crumble, and remove 1/2 cup for the streussel topping.
Add 1 cup milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
Stir into a batter, and pour into a 9 by 12 aluminum cake pan which has a cover for it. I love covered cake pans, especially the old ones which slide off. It is always a nice surprise to play with them and find the goodies inside.
After the batter is spread, just spoon the huckleberry sauce in dollops and drizzles. Don't overdo it, just make it look like a kid did it and it will look professional.
Then cover the to with the half cup of reserved crumble.
Bake at 350 degrees until a toothpick comes out clean. That is around 30 to 45 minutes.
After it is done, let it cool, and then have some fun in making a butter cream frosting for those wonderful streussel line frostings to dress it up.
I don't really have a recipe for this, but use 1 cup of granulated sugar, about 1 tablespoon of real butter and then a tablespoon or two of heavy whipping cream.
Just get it the way you want it by adding a splash more cream, as you do want it quite stiff.
The fun part is putting it into a plastic bag like a zip lock, cutting off a very small corner of it, carefully pressing the frosting down to the edge and then squeezing sort of hard as wonderful twisting frosting lines will come squirting out and you will look like a pro.
This stuff stores in the fridge well and freeze well too. The garden huckleberry this way actually is better than blueberries as it has more tang and melds better than commercial blueberries.
Some additional chef notes for the pro who should only try this at home........anyone can do this as if things don't turn out I feed mine to the chickens as I did with a bad batch of berries and they loved them.
My favorite cook in school was a goddess named Martha who could take powdered eggs and other government surplus crap and make them taste like heaven.
She always used bread crumbs for her streussel and when I am not in a hurry I do too. They make a prettier topping that holds up better.
If you like more spice in the darker Jackie version, just add 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of nutmeg.
Options are a half cup of nuts. Walnuts of course will be more robust, pecans are sweeter and almonds give a light sweetness to this.
If you have a death wish, you can substitute buttermilk which is sour for milk and use baking soda to cause the rising action, but buttermilk is yogurt culture and is in all cheese now. It bothers me so I just use Martha's sweet recipe.
Oh and always use fresh baking powder and not be like me in keeping big cans around which do nothing but make flat pancakes.
This is a very lovely recipe which does very will with tea and cream for breakfast, even if I had coffee and cream for breakfast this morning with it.
As old Earl used to say, Bon apetite abiento.
agtG
