Food Friday!: Girl Scout Coffee Cake
I was a Girl Scout while in elementary school and we were always presented with projects and opportunities to earn badges for our uniform. One such badge was the cooking/baking badge. In order to earn this badge, our troop leaders designed a bake-off where we were each given the same recipe- "The Great Coffee Cake"-, we were to bake it without any help from our parents (although certainly not without the supervision of our parents) in an unmarked/unlabelled baking dish, and submit it to a panel of judges (3 parents...one of which was my dad), and they chose the top three best preparations after sampling all umpteen cakes. Weathergirl and I were selected as two of the top three winners.
We got our skills from our Mama...
After the competition, we had almost two full cakes left to bring home, and Banker Boy
loved the cake! So much so, that he asked for us to make it for him each year on his birthday, which we did as often as we could. :) It simply became known as "Girl Scout Coffee Cake" in our family. My mom still has the original recipe print out that was given to each of us. :) Remember, this recipe is easy enough for a bunch of elementary school age Girl Scouts to make...
and not in an easy-bake oven! Enjoy!
Ingredients
2 1/2 cups flour
2/3 cups oil
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 egg, beaten
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
Directions
Grease a 9 x 13" pan. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cream together flour, oil, and sugars. Remove 1 and 1/2 cups of the mixture and set aside.
To the remaining flour/sugar mixture, add egg, buttermilk, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Mix together. Batter will be thin.
To the set aside flour/sugar mixture, add cinnamon and nuts.
Press half of the crumb flour/sugar/nuts/cinnamon mixture into the bottom of the pan.
Pour batter over the crumbs and sprinkle the remaining half of the crumb mixture on top.
Bake 45 minutes, or until done (tooth pick comes out clean).