Individual Coffee Cakes

Let me start by saying that this was one intimidating recipe. I was faced with the reality of my 3.5 feet of usable counter space, lack of awesome marble pastry board (like this one from Williams-Sonoma) and sheer laziness when it comes to multiple steps. I like to keep my fabulousness simple. Did I mention that this recipe requires two days to complete? Definitely not my style. But my head was filled with thoughts of replicating my own favorite coffee cake (or danish), and I was sucked in. I would like to say that my own favorite is super exclusive and only available in this little teeny boulangerie in Paris but it's not because it's this:

Entenmann's Raspberry Danish

If you haven't had an Entenmann's Raspberry Danish, get down to the closest grocery store you can and buy one. You won't find it at Whole Foods. At this point I would like to say that after making my own I will never be going back to the blue box that is probably filled with 1,000 grams of toxic waste (You'll have to look into the nutritional information yourself, this blogger is too lazy to offer sound reporting at this point) but I can't. I love that little blue box and even if it really isn't coffee cake, that's the kind of coffee cake I like.

Now after that monologue I should probably clarify that I am not saying that these were not delicious, because they were. You'll just have to try them for yourself. So without further ado:

Individual Cinnamon Coffee Cakes with Chocolate-Cherry-Almond Swirl from Fine Cooking's "Sweet Cakes" magazine- link to recipe here 
I didn't use any substitutions for this recipe, except that instead of chopping everything in a food processor I chopped it in my Braun hand chopper (like this one available on Amazon) because that's what I have. I did the chopping in two stages since there was more than my little bowl could handle. Here's the not-quite finished product:

The only time adjustment was that instead of overnight the dough ended up being in the 'fridge for 2 nights, and was fine. Since I have tile counters with divots deep enough for a chocolate chip I taped down wax paper to roll the dough out onto, something I will definitely be doing for future baking projects.

Lesson: the dough gets VERY sticky VERY fast, even if your husband is the one taking the pictures. The shot above is prior to cutting the individual rolls.

Well my hand's were clean....

This would be Bretta's opinion of me spending my evenings baking, she gets as far away from me as she can. It's my punishment. Sorry for the zombie eyes...