Sour Cream Coffee Cake

All of our Zingerman’s Bakehouse pastries and coffee cakes are baked with full-flavored ingredients, but without preservatives. The good news is we’ve done the hard work of tasting and testing to ensure that they can be enjoyed for weeks to come.

If enjoying soon, keep them at room temperature.

Each baked good will have an “eat or freeze by” sticker that is about two weeks from when the package ships out. If enjoying the treats within a week or so of delivery, they can be kept at room temperature in the packaging they arrived in or in a plastic bag. Avoid the refrigerator, it can ruin the texture.

If enjoying later, keep them in the freezer.

For longer term storage, all of our baked goods freeze well for up to three months. They can be stored in the freezer in their original packaging or, if they’ve been opened, double wrapped in plastic bags. 

After the freezer, it is best to allow frozen pastries and coffee cakes to defrost slowly at room temperature in the packaging. That’s all–though with some pastries like scones, a little warm up in an oven will make them extra delicious. 

The classic American walnut sour cream coffee cake has been our top selling mail order baked good for three decades, almost since the day we turned on the phones at Zingerman’s Mail Order (long before the internet). What makes this cake so great?

The recipe

Zingerman’s coffee cake is made without icing. This makes it looks like an oddball compared to most coffee cakes out there. Nothing against icing, but too many times icing is a ruse. It’s an atmospheric distraction. It diverts your attention from the sub par ingredients that make up the land mass below. Plus, for many folks, me included, it’s too sweet.

Our coffee cake has just a hint of sweetness. It’s richly flavored with creamy sour cream, spiced Korintje cinnamon from Indonesia, and toasted walnuts. After you eat a slice it lingers in your memory.

The packaging

We pack the coffee cake in one of our illustrated cartoon boxes or in one of our wooden crates made by Wisconsin’s last cheese crate manufacturer. The packaging is fantastic for two reasons: it keeps the coffee cake from getting too jostled or smashed on the journey, and it makes for great gift presentation. Bonus points to those clever folks who re-purpose the boxes and crates for pet beds and other fun uses.

The pan

You can’t make the coffee cake without a bundt-style pan. It’s the pan with the hole in the middle which conducts heat to the interior of the cake. The batter for a sour cream coffee cake is very dense. If the hole wasn’t there the middle would stay raw and collapse into a soggy puddle.

The pan was not a part of American baking until the second half of the twentieth century. H. David Dahlquist, founder of Nordic Ware in Minnesota, created it on the request of Rose Joshua and Fannie Schanfield, two members of Minneapolis’s Hadassah Jewish women’s group. They were nostalgic for dense European cakes like kugelhopf and bundkuchen. They showed Dahlquist a European pan with a hole in the middle and he recreated it to sell with his other baking equipment.

Within a decade it was the top selling pan in America. Three decades later, it was our top selling cake.

1. Butter tastes better

You can’t tell just from looking at a cookie or a piece of cake whether it’s been baked with butter or shortening. The bottom line on baked goods’ flavor is that butter tastes better. It’s also about ten times more costly, so many bakeries make the choice to use less expensive shortenings or margarine. You can taste and smell the difference—pull apart a Bakehouse cinnamon roll and stick it right up to your nose. The sweet, rich scent of butter is right up front, followed by the soft smell of the cinnamon. Shortening, on the other hand, has no aroma to speak of. Good pastry should smell good.

2. Better butter

Zingerman’s Bakehouse doesn’t just use any butter. Many of our baked goods start with sweet butter from Grassland. It tastes better, has less water, and more flavor. There’s no way around it—the better the butter the better the baked goods.

3. Belgian chocolate

There’s chocolate. And then there’s Belgian chocolate. Our chocolate chunk cookies are loaded with big bites of great chocolate, including Callebaut Belgian chocolate. Higher in cocoa content, Callebaut is chocolatier, richer, more delicious than the inexpensive, mass-produced chocolates you’ll find in most baked goods.

4. Real maple syrup

Not Pearl Milling Company or Mrs. Butterworth’s—we use real 100% pure maple syrup from northern Michigan to sweeten our oatmeal raisin cookies. Sugar sweetens. But maple syrup adds depth, flavor and character to a cookie.

5. Country-style sour cream

I’m a sour cream addict from way back. And the sour cream we get is so thick we’ve had guests think that we’d given them a dish of butter by mistake. (Standard issue sour cream is thin and watery by comparison.) It adds enormous richness and flavor to our sour cream coffee cake.

6. Real vanilla

Real vanilla is a the first thing that big bakeries eliminate. You can use industrial, imitation vanilla for about a twentieth of the cost of the real thing. And, by proportion, you use so little vanilla in a batch of baked goods, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that no one will notice. But… you can clearly taste the difference. Real vanilla is literally almost 150 times as complex in flavor as artificial vanillin. Take away anything else, but please, please don’t take away my vanilla—it adds incredible aroma and flavor to anything it’s used in.

7. Red Flame raisins

Thompson raisins—the ones in the little red boxes—are such a standard that many people have never had the chance to try anything else. But there are other raisins out there, and not surprisingly, some taste a lot better. Red Flames are plump, juicy, joyously flavorful. They’re the star in our Bakehouse’s oatmeal raisin cookies, pecan raisin bread, and cinnamon raisin bread.

8. Organic unbleached & unbromated flours

The better the flour, the better the baked goods. We use organic AP flour for practically all of our breads and baked goods.

9. Fresh eggs

The norm nowadays for commercial bakeries is to use frozen eggs that come in white plastic buckets. We stubbornly stick to old-fashioned eggs in the traditional oval-shaped white shell, the way they made ’em “back in the old days.”

10. Toasted pecans, almonds, and walnuts

Toasting takes time and time is money. But it also adds a lot of flavor to nuts. So we do it. Toasting brings depth to the walnuts in our sour cream coffee cake, the pecans in our pecan pie and pecan blondies, and everything else we make with nuts in it.

11. Indonesian cinnamon

Cinnamon is such a staple in baked goods that a simple switch from one cinnamon to another can make an enormous difference. We stick with Korintje cinnamon from Indonesia, which has a rich flavor with a tongue-tingling tickle to it.

12. Love

The crew at the Bakehouse is adamant that everything that enters and emerges from their ovens does so with the same personal seal of approval—the kind you’d get if you went over to your grandmother’s for a cold glass of milk and a brownie right out of the oven.

Twenty years ago we started gift boxing our as-of-yet-not-quite-famous sour cream coffeecake in traditional cheese crates made by Dufeck Manufacturing in Denmark, Wisconsin. What I didn’t know then was they were—and are—the last surviving cheese crate maker in the United States.

There used to be crate makers all over the country.

“When we started a hundred years ago, there were cheese makers on every corner and they all needed crates,” explained Paul Dufeck, the fourth generation of Dufecks to make the cheese crates. “Back then you could find a crate maker every thirty miles or so and they’d make crates for everyone,” Paul continued. “The crates were used for aging twenty-two pound rounds of cheddar cheese. The cheese would form into wheels in the crates and they makers would flip them, age them, and ship them when they were ready, all in the same crate.”

Aging in wooden crates may seem odd, but wood is great at protecting cheese. It allows the cheese to breathe, so its flavors can better develop. “There’s something special about the flavor of a cheese aged in wooden crate,” Paul continued. “There are still a few cheesemakers in Wisconsin that age cheddar in our crates—and one in North Carolina—but the practice is pretty rare nowadays.”

It takes at least six different people to make a Dufeck crate.

Three folks operate the veneer lathe which is like a large pencil sharpener, but instead of whittling a pencil to a point, it sheers off thin sheets of wood from large logs that are soft and malleable enough to be formed into different shapes. This veneer makes the sides of our round and oval crates. The fourth person makes the tops and bottoms of the crates from planed pieces of wood that fit together with tongue and groove (no glue or adhesives). Another person nails the crates together. Finally the tops of the crates are sanded by the last person who also screen-prints our logo on top. Once the crate is finished, it’s moved upstairs to dry for a couple days and then they’re shipped directly to us. We buy a few truckloads a year of different sized crates, any one of which we’re happy to use to store cats and sour cream coffeecake.

Dufeck’s crates are one of the things people love about our gifts—but that’s not all they’re good for.

We get pictures all the time of people repurposing them—as button boxes, as cat condominiums, as yarn crates. I used to think we were a little strange for repurposing a cheese crate to hold a coffeecake but then I realized everyone does—it turns out Dufeck has been doing the same thing for half a century.

In the middle of the 20th century the small cheesemakers closed or consolidated into larger companies and the larger cheesemaking factories started making huge blocks of cheese and shipping them to factories that would cut and cryovac the blocks and ship them in cardboard, not wood.

“You either diversified or you died,” Paul explained, “and that’s what we did. We make pallets and crates for large equipment and we recycle all our scrap into mulch and sawdust that we also sell, but we’re the only ones left that still make cheese crates.”