Raspberry Almond Coffee Cake

* 2 c. all-purpose flour

* 2/3 c. sugar

* 1 tsp baking powder

* ½ tsp baking soda

* ¼ tsp salt

* ½ tsp cinnamon

* 1 c. sour cream

* ¼ c butter, melted

* 1 tsp almond extract

* 2 eggs

* About ¼ c. raspberry juice, drained from berries (or ¼ c. milk)

* 2 c. raspberries, fresh or frozen (thawed)

* ½ c. slivered almonds (or sliced)

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit

Mix dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, salt, cinnamon) in a large bowl. In a medium bowl, mix the sour cream, melted butter, almond extract, eggs, and juice or milk. Blend well. Add the butter/sour cream mixture to the dry ingredients and stir until just moist. Batter will be thick.

Spoon about half the batter into a greased 9” round cake pan or a deep-dish pie plate. Spread the raspberries evenly on top, then spoon remaining batter over. Top with almonds. Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes. (You may need to set the cake pan on a baking sheet to catch any drips.)

The cake made with raspberry juice:

The cake made with milk (note that it’s not blue):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make raspberry almond coffee cake. It’s so good.

Raspberries are my favorite fruit, and one of my favorite foods. I also know where raspberries grow wild near my house, so every year for a few blissful weeks I can have as many raspberries as I want for free, completely organic and fresh. All I have to do is pick them and then spend the next two weeks trying not to scratch my chigger bites.

I eat a lot of the raspberries by themselves, but I also like to cook with them. This week’s recipe is one I make every year with fresh berries and it’s delicious. But because I get these episodes ready well in advance, I needed to make this week’s raspberry almond coffee cake before raspberries were in season locally. Rather than spend ridiculous amounts of money on a tiny package of fresh raspberries that are half moldy anyway, I just bought frozen raspberries. They worked even better than fresh.

Then, a week later, I decided I needed to make the recipe again using fresh raspberries. So I bought the tiny package of fresh raspberries but I also added some early-ripening blackberries I picked this afternoon.

Besides the raspberries, which are expensive if you have to buy them, this recipe calls for almond extract and slivered almonds. Almond extract doesn’t really cost that much considering how long it will last you, and it gives a sophisticated and subtle flavor to recipes that you just don’t get from vanilla. But if you absolutely cannot get almond extract, you can use vanilla extract instead. Slivered almonds have a good texture, but again, if you can’t find slivered almonds, you can use sliced or chopped almonds instead. In fact, when I made the recipe a second time for this episode, I realized I’d forgotten to buy slivered almonds. I used sliced instead, and they worked just as well—maybe even better, since they’re crunchier.

This recipe is unusual in several ways, but it’s also really easy. You’ll need two mixing bowls, one large and one medium-sized. You’ll also need a 9” round cake pan or a deep-dish pie plate. Don’t use anything smaller than a 9” pan or the cake will overflow as it rises.

If you use frozen berries, you need to thaw them before you do anything else. The easiest way to thaw a bag of frozen raspberries is how I did it, which is to put them in a grocery bag in the car on a day when it’s 90 out and then get stuck in traffic. Voila, totally thawed before I even got them home! Or you can buy them a day or two before you need them and stick them in the fridge. If you forget to thaw them, you can either microwave them on defrost setting or fill a large bowl with warm water and plunk the unopened bag in t...