Apple Walnut Coffee Cake

Today I have a semi-naughty coffee cake for your breakfast or brunch needs. It's naughty because I used full-fat ingredients and a fair amount of sugar. Here's how that happened: My 10-month old son has yogurt with his oatmeal most mornings. Because he's a growing baby, whole milk dairy products are recommended. (He's only eating cheese and yogurt at the moment.) Last week I mistakenly bought vanilla-flavored whole milk yogurt instead of plain. Although he didn't seem to mind the vanilla flavored, he gets quite enough sugar as it is from all the apple sauce he gulps down. Thus, I switched him back to plain yogurt as soon as I made it back to the store. That left me with nearly an entire quart of whole milk vanilla yogurt, which neither my husband nor I really needed to eat. (I make two batches of my vanilla yogurt using skim milk per week.)

I suppose I could have made frozen yogurt with the rich stuff, but just happened to notice the recipe on the back of the yogurt container: Glazed Apple Walnut Coffee Cake. It sounded rather tasty and as I had everything needed on hand last night I gave it a whirl. Quite tasty, as well as nice and moist! Next time I may add a little more cinnamon, but it was still very yummy. You'll notice that I did not make the glaze. My thinking was that the cake was so rich that we really didn't need a sugary glaze and I think I was right. However, I have included the glaze recipe below if you're interested.

Apple Walnut Coffee Cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 c butter, softened
1 c granulated sugar
1/4 c brown sugar (org. 1/2 c)
4 eggs (I used 2 egg whites in place of 1 egg)
1 c vanilla whole milk yogurt
2 apples, cored, peeled and diced
3/4 walnuts, chopped

Glaze
3/4 vanilla whole milk yogurt
3/4 c apple cider
1/2 confectioners' sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour angel food or bundt cake pan.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. In a large bowl beat together butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Beat in 1 cup of yogurt.

With mixer on low, add flour mixture until just combined. Stir in apples and walnuts.

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for 60 minutes or until a tester comes out clean. Rest in pan for 15 minutes, then turn out onto wire rack. Cool completely.

To make glaze, whisk together cider, 3/4 cup yogurt and confectioners' sugar. Pour over cake.

Serves 6