Cream Cheese Coffee Cake from Cook's Illustrated
Over the weekend we had some of Nat's friends over to say hello and see the babe. Nat said that we couldn't just put out a partially eaten sleeve of saltines and sugared fruit slices; we had to pull something together for a brunch-ish crowd. Now....I'm not normally the baker in our house - that's Nat's domain. But with her having her hands full (with the child-rearing and all), it was time to play flour scientist and bake up a cake of sorts - a coffee cake. For my birthday a few years ago, my mom started to give us a Cooks Illustrated subscription. She renews it every April and I've come to enjoy thumbing through it each month. I've occasionally referred to it when making something (like potatoes in the oven), but I've never baked anything from their pages. Aside from the crazy quantities (you can sense that they really did tinker with them - I mean what's with all the 1/8 of a teaspoons! We don't even have one of those!), we didn'