About

I'm a tweaker...of recipes, that is. It's not that I haven't invented recipes of my own, it's just that I figure why reinvent the wheel. It's not so much laziness as it is efficiency. It's easy to take a recipe and make it into what you want by adding or subtracting ingredients thereby creating a different recipe. I'm willing to bet that's how alot of recipes are created. Some people do this because of dietary restrictions. Others, like me, go to the pantry or the fridge to retrieve an item for the recipe and then shout an expletive because we don't have said item and must make a substitution.

Since I love coffee cakes this blog is devoted to the tweaking of coffee cake recipes. If I have been inspired by a recipe I will provide a link to that recipe at the end of the post; assuming of course that it didn't come from a cookbook, in which case I'll provide the name of the cookbook and the name of the original recipe. 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention my flour situation. For years, I have routinely purchased equal amounts of unbleached white flour and whole wheat flour and combined them in one container. I don't particularly care for baked goods made entirely with whole wheat flour. Call me a failed granola pseudo-hippie (I did go to UC Berkeley), but my reasoning is that if I only eat something occasionally then gosh darn it I should make it the way I want. That's not to say that my conscience is entirely free of guilt. So, to assuage my conscience, I've done what's called a "compromise". It seems this has become a dirty word lately, but I digress. Unless otherwise specified, this is the flour combination that I use. If you choose to use entirely white flour or entirely whole wheat flour, then your results will be different than mine. By how much? I can't say, but that's part of the fun of tweaking recipes...assuming you have the patience, the time, and a sense of humor.

I hope you will like these coffee cake recipes, but more importantly, I hope you will be inspired to tweak them and create new recipes of your own. If you do, I'd love for you to let me know what you did differently in the Comments section. I'm always looking for new coffee cake ideas.

Happy tweaking!
-CD