Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day

I love breakfast. I have a mild obsession with cereal in general, so I guess it's natural that I would look forward to this meal. Even at this moment, I probably have about ten boxes in my cabinet right now, four of which are open and I eat on a fairly regular basis. I know some people wouldn't understand my obsession with cereal, but I think it's a marvelous food invention that you can eat anytime and pretty much anywhere as long as you're not committed to eating it with milk, which I am not. Not to mention you can coat chicken with it, make snack mixes with it, or top a cheesy potato casserole with it (as I did for Thanksgiving dinner!). In addition, the whole concept of breakfast usually involves some type pastry. Muffins, pancakes, waffles, scones, breads, bagels, English muffins, even cake. Coffee cake that is! And who doesn't want to eat cake for breakfast! In my family, it's a tradition to have coffee cake for breakfast on the major holidays (i.e. Thanksgiving and Christmas), so on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I busted out my baking supplies and tried a new coffee cake recipe.

This fruit-filled coffee cake did not go quite as stated in the recipe. First of all, the fruit pie filling was supposed to sink to the bottom of the cake. Yeah... As you can obviously see, it did not. This caused a couple problems. All that filling sitting on top of my cake severely altered the baking time because the cake underneath could not rise properly. The recipe originally stated to bake the cake for 35 minutes. When I checked it at 35 minutes, I had cake soup. Not exactly what I wanted to eat the next morning, so I kept adding more and more minutes to the baking time until finally (about an hour or so into baking), I declared it done. Actually, I probably hadn't even declared it done at this point, I was more praying it was done! The edges had gotten a little more brown then I would have liked, but I tried to cover them with foil during the second half of the baking time to keep them from burning while I was trying (praying) to bake the middle of my cake.

After the cake had completely cooled, I added the powdered sugar glaze, which as you can see turned out beautifully! For about five hours. When I woke up the next morning and went to slice up my cake, all the glaze had dissolved and I had puddles of pie filling moisture in all the wells in my cake. So I did what any baker would do, I tried to salvage it. I soaked up the extra liquid with paper towels, sliced it up, and hoped it was still edible, and surprisingly, it was! My husband and I had tried a piece the night before to make sure it was baked and it tasted good, but honestly, letting it sit overnight really let the pie filling flavors take over, it tasted so much more delectable the next morning!

Needless to say, this recipe was more stressful than it should have been and while this cake has a happy ending, I probably won't be making this recipe twice!