Yesterday was NOT a good day for baking! Andrea invited a few of us over to her house for breakfast today. I decided to make a Jewish Coffee Cake. It's a great recipe that we got from PJ's cousins about 30 years ago. Everyone up in Bristol, CT (Polish town!) make this cake or the all did back then. It calls for a tube pan. The only tube pan I have left is a heavy cast iron one that makes the shape of a rose out of the cake. That would look pretty to bring to a friends house I thought! I decided to also make one for PJ to bring to work. I love to bake but don't want the results in the house. The workers appreciate free food so why not!
I got everything mixed up and put the tube pan in the oven. I then started to mix up the ingredients for the second one. I had everything in the bowl except the vanilla. I grabbed the vanilla (or what i thought was vanilla) and just eyeballed one... two... teaspoons of the vanilla. I looked at it thinking how come the vanilla isn't brown? Then the smell hit me! It was Anise! I quickly tried to scoop it out but it kind of soaked into the sugar, flour and eggs so there was still some in there. Oh well, maybe this will make it even better even though I hate Anise!
I made sure I let the pans sit for 15 minutes (like the directions said) before taking the cakes out of the pans. The one with the Anise came out easily and was a nice looking coffee cake. The one in the rose pan... it didn't want to budge! Finally i got 1/2 of it out and had to wrestle with it to get the rest out! What a mess!


I decided to bring the Anise one to Andrea's house. It will be all friends so if it's that bad, we'll have a few laughs and throw it out! PJ, Alyssa, Dave and I each had a piece of the ugly yet good tasting cake. I wrapped up the other one to be all ready for this mornings breakfast. I got online to check my emails and found out that today was canceled! It's going to be Friday!!! After all of that. I don't know if I should make another one for Friday, just not in that pan or just go for something else! It is delicious though!