Lissa Dobbs's Blog: Shadow Walkers of Grevared - Posts Tagged "cake"

Hope this finds everyone well!

Since we're coming into fall, I thought I'd share a recipe my family and I really love. We call it Poor Man's Coffee Cake because we created it on a night we all wanted something sweet, but no one wanted to have to go to the store. So we looked through the cabinets and what we had was pancake mix.

This recipe is easy to make and can be thrown together in less than five minutes; however, cook time on it is almost an hour. So, when that friend calls at the last minute and announces that she's coming over an hour later, you can toss this together and let it cook while you frantically clean the crayon off the walls and get a shower.

Ingredients:

pancake mix
vanilla
butter
brown sugar
cinnamon
OPTIONAL: anything else under the sun

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Pour about half a box of pancake mix into the bowl. Add 1/2 cup sugar, cinnamon, and a dash of vanilla. Add a little less than the recommended amount of water so the batter will resemble cake batter more than pancake batter.

Thoroughly grease either a loaf pan or, at the least, a 9x9 cake pan.

Pour half the batter into the pan. Cover with brown sugar and cinnamon. Add the rest of the batter. Top with brown sugar, cinnamon, and several pads of butter.

Cook at 350 for about an hour until a fork inserted in the center comes out clean.

Variations:

For chocolate coffee cake, add cocoa powder and omit the cinnamon. I up the sugar to at least 1 cup since the cocoa is unsweetened.

I've added fruits and nuts, mixed in muffin mix, used chocolate chips, chopped up candy - you name it, and we've made a cake with it. And all of them turned out wonderfully.

Storage:

Storage at my house really isn't much of an issue, but if the cake has fruit, I usually refrigerate it. If not, I just wrap it. It warms well in the microwave, and it works well as a breakfast cake, too.


Happy experimenting!

Best wishes!