ABC: Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake

Hanaa asked me to participate as a guest blogger for her ABC baking club. It took me about 2 minutes to decide. The menu for this month is Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake from Flo Baker's Baking for All Occasions.

The recipe for this cake reminds me so much of cinnamon rolls, which I love. I am not a big fan of cardamon so I opted out of it.

I do not want to make the full portion of the recipe, so I made split the recipe into 5. It is not very challenging because most of the measurement is in grams. The biggest challenge is to figure out where to bake it in as the original recipe calls for a 9 inch pan.

Fortunately I do have a 4 inch pan, that I bought on a whim last year. Going off the appendix section in Rose's Heavenly Cakes, it said that 4 inch pan is 1 3/4 cups  and a 9 inch pan is 8 2/3 cups. Dividing that up 1.75/8.67 = 0.20.

But then looking at the recipe it used 2 eggs. Would be hard to split it into 5 and I don't want to waste eggs. The recipe used some water in the dough, so I decided to replace some of the water with the remainder egg.

The batter came together very easy. One thing I love about making smaller recipes is that everything is faster. Hanaa had emailed and warned that some people said they can't taste the spice in the dough, so it might be an idea to up the spice. I noticed this is also the case when I make cinnamon rolls, I have to up the cinnamon otherwise I can't taste it. I didn't really measure the spices, though I think I probably used 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and 1/4 tsp of nutmeg (for my 1/5 recipe of the cake, which is a lot).

While the dough is rising I made the butterscotch glaze. Hanaa also warned that she heard the butterscotch glaze might not be enough, so I made 1/2 recipe. I used Lyle's Golden Syrup instead of corn syrup. I didn't read the recipe well and missed the part about melting the butter with the sugar over low heat. With medium heat the butter melted fast but the sugar was still pretty grainy. I didn't think of it at that time and dumped most of the glaze into the pan.

The dough took only 1 hour to rise, and in the picture below you can see the indentation made by my finger.

Next I rolled out the dough. Instead of mixing cinnamon with the melted butter, I glazed the dough with the butter and sprinkled a lot of cinnamon on it.

Now the fun part, coiling the layers in the pan.

1st layer.

2nd layer.

3rd and 4th layer.

There's still a bit of space and I was really tempted to add 1 more layer. But the recipe said not to fill the pan too full so I didn't.

Instead I grabbed a small ramekin, dumped some remaining butterscotch glaze that I have left and put the remaining 2 layer in there.

Here they are after 1 hour rising.

Baked for 25 minutes.

They were ready just in time for afternoon coffee.

Tasting impressions:
The butterscotch glaze did crystallize. It never really melted and it looked bad on top of the cake. It still tasted really good and we ate the smaller cake with our coffee. There's still not enough glaze in my opinion, which is amazing considering it's 1/5 cake vs. 1/2 glaze. I have the bigger cake for breakfast tomorrow and I might make more glaze for it then :).

Thank you Hanaa for inviting me to be a guest participant. I had a lot of fun making (and photographing) this cake!!!