Overnight Coffee Cake

I've been making this coffee cake for a long time.  It's so convenient - mix it up the day or night before, refrigerate it overnight, and bake it in the morning.  Warm fresh-baked coffee cake for breakfast or brunch.  What could be better than that?

Actually, I think I may have just figured out how to make this coffee cake even better - after all these years!  Add banana!  I don't know why I never thought of it before, but this past weekend I added a layer of chopped banana between the cake batter and the topping.  It baked up ooey gooey and yummy.  I may just be adding bananas from now on.  For now, I'll leave the bananas as optional - while I let my imagination go wild thinking of all the other fruits I can add and should have been adding all these years.

Overnight Coffee Cake
adapted from The Best of Mennonite Fellowship Meals

 Cake:

• 2/3 cup butter
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Topping:

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts
  and/or 1/2 cup coconut
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. nutmeg

Directions:

1.  Cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well. Stir in buttermilk.
2. Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt.  Stir into butter/sugar mixture and mix well.
3. Spread batter into greased 13x9" pan.  OR divide between 2 round cake pans.
4. Mix all ingredients for topping and sprinkle over batter.  Variation: cut up 2 bananas and spread over batter before adding the topping. Refrigerate overnight or for at least 8 hours.
5. Bake at 350° for 45-50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted near the middle comes out clean.

I usually make this in the 13x9" pan. This time I wanted to try the banana but I wasn't sure I wanted it on the whole cake, so I used the 2 round pans.  I spread a layer of banana on top of the batter in one of the pans before sprinkling the topping on, and I did the other pan like normal.  I should have just used 2 bananas and gone with the whole 13x9" cake.  It was that good!

When the kids were little I used to bake this cake in the two round pans all the time.  We'd have one to eat, and I'd freeze the other one for later.  If you use the disposable foil cake pans, one of them will fit nicely into a gallon zipper bag.  My cake pans won't fit, so we just had to eat both cakes.

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