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Lime Coffee Cake Recipe
May 19, 2003
Who can blame me for being a skeptic about low-fat baked goods, even when the recipe du jour is a Lime Coffee Cake from world-famous Canyon Ranch Spa.
Many low-fat cakes and muffins have a chewy, rubbery texture, and a taste that is mediocre at best. Muffins and quickbread type cakes are supposed to be light and delicate--If you have to use force to break off the top of a muffin, something is not quite right.
You can't exactly call this cake 'health food'....Here are the stats on it.
It bakes in a standard 9x5 loaf pan. This one loaf is supposed to yield 16 slices, at 4 grams of fat per serving, and 24g of carbs for you Atkins people. I'm not sure I am capable of slicing baked goods that thin. Ahhh yes, It is now clear to me--this is part of a spa menu for people who are capable of exercising portion control.
For the whole loaf you use 3T. of butter and 3T. Canola oil. Which to their credit is quite a bit less than most baked goods. But how will it taste!?
Mixing the batter was standard. Cream the fats with the sugar, add the egg whites, add the buttermilk and flour. A red flag immediately went up when the recipe kept telling me to mix, mix, mix even after I added the flour. Isn't this one of the no-no's of all delicate, cake-type baked goods? I thought all that mixing makes for a tough cake. At any rate, mix away I did. Dumped the batter into the loaf pan, and baked for about 45 minutes.
The cake came out a beautiful golden color with bright flakes of lime zest throughout. Very nice.
The flavor of this coffee cake was absolutely wonderful. It was bright, and sweet, and perfect. Yes, it was a wee bit rubbery and chewy-but just a bit. I'm guessing this was more about over-mixing than ingredients. Next time I think I will mix in the flour just until it is incorporated, and fold in the lime zest and juice at the end - see how that helps.
With a few tweaks I think this one is a keeper.
To feature an actual recipe taken from a cookbook, it is best to request permission from the publisher or author. In the early days on 101 Cookbooks, I would tell people where to find the recipe, but not feature the recipe itself. Eventually I began to request permission to run the actual recipes, but this wasn't one of them. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't. My apologies!
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