spiced coffee cake

My mom once told me that if you change just one aspect of a recipe, you can claim it as your own, even if you clearly ripped it off from the copyright holder. I know I shouldn't take legal advice from a 20-year-old memory of my mother, who is not qualified to dispense legal advice in any case, but I feel compelled to point this out. Why? Because even though I changed many aspects of this recipe, I still feel like I clearly ripped it off. The recipe in question is the Sour Cream Streusel Coffee Cake from Vegan Vittles.

Vegan Vittles was my first vegan cookbook, and for a long time it was my only cookbook, because I got it back in the mid-'90s, before veganism got taken over by the foodies and their flush of ornate cookbooks. Not that I mind this flush of cookbooks, but although my copy of Vegan Vittles has almost completely fallen apart by now, it remains one of my favorites. I based the below coffee cake recipe on a formula from this book, swapping out okara for the sour cream and amping up the spices, along with a few other minor changes.



Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly spray an 8x8-inch pan with oil.

In a bowl, combine
1/2 cup turbinado sugar
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. allspice
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
and set aside. This is your streusel topping.

In a bowl, combine
2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
and mix thoroughly. Set aside.

In yet another bowl, whisk together
1/2 cup okara
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. apple cider vinegar
1 cup apple sauce
1/3 cup maple syrup
2 Tablespoons canola oil
1 tsp. vanilla
until all ingredients are thoroughly incorporated.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, and mix thoroughly. Put one half of the batter into the square baking pan, and sprinkle half of the streusel topping evenly over the surface.



Scrape the rest of the batter into the pan and gently spread it out over the streusel, being careful not to disturb the streusel too much.



Sprinkle the rest of the streusel evenly onto the surface of the cake.



Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 40 minutes.

Verdict: This was almost too easy. The only modification I'd want to make for next time is to amp those spices up even more, perhaps by putting them in the batter as well as in the streusel itself.