Cherry Streusel Cake (or cherry coffee cake if you're American)

Ingredients

Cake:
280g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
310ml sour cream or yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
60g butter
190g sugar
2 eggs

Streusel:
180g flour
160g finely chopped walnuts or pecans
260g light brown sugar
150g melted butter
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt

Cherries:
220g frozen, pitted cherries

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180C with a rack in the middle & line a 9X13inch pan with baking paper.

1) Blitz all the streusel toppings together in a food processor and set aside. If you don't have one, just mix by hand. Melted butter helps it all lump together nicely, but you can skip melting it if you like and get a more crumbly texture
2) In a large bowl, cream your butter and sugar.
3) Beat in eggs one at a time
4) Measure your dry ingredients together in one bowl, and your yoghurt/sour cream mixed with vanilla in another.
5) Add a third of the flour mix to your large bowl and mix in. Then add half your yoghurt/sour cream mix and stir in. Then some flour, then some wet stuff, then the last of the flour.
6) Pour into your lined pan and spread to evenly cover the bottom.
7) Scatter the cherries over the batter
8) Scatter the Streusel over the top and push around to get even coverage. You may get geysers of batter that erupt through the cherries and streusel, but that's ok.
9) Bake and check after 40 minutes. You may need a lot more, but that's a good time to check and turn the pan for even baking.

EXCLUSIVE: THE REAL STORY!!!

I was out on my weekly shopping excursion the other day, equipped with my granny trolley as well as my trusty rucksack. The mission was mainly to source fresh fruit and veg, seeing as we have our flour needs covered (thank you, 16kg bags), as well as our meat and much of our dairy delivered (milk a bit of an exception, as no milkman will deliver to flats here, it seems). By the time I got to the freezer, my rolling basket was fairly loaded up, but I was quite keen to get some frozen fruit, as the kids seem to like it, and it's super cheap. There was only one bag of raspberries left, but an abundance of cherries, so I grabbed one. I quickly remembered that my kids don't really like frozen cherries as much, and I don't like the mess they make thawing them, but it was too late. I had lifted the bag, and in these Covid19 times, you don't put the bag back in the supermarket. Into the shopping basket they went, and straight into the freezer when I got home.

While rifling through the drawers a few days later they glared at me accusingly, untouched. I apologized and promised soon, very soon, I'd find a use for them...then I shut the door in their face. a couple days later, they called out again, and I gave in. I pulled out my trusty Joy of Cooking, and made what Americans call a coffee cake, but put in cherries where the recipe called for either apples or cranberries, and doubling the amount of streusel that the recipe called for.

But there's still half a bag of cherries in the freezer.