This Raspberry Coffee Cake deserves your attention if you want to make a crowd-pleasing dessert. With its moist and tender cake, tangy yet sweet raspberry filling, crunchy topping and yummy glaze, this cake is one that people will want again and again. The recipe looks like it contains a lot of steps, but it’s much simpler than it seems. You can also take a few shortcuts to help make the process go faster.

This is a wonderful cake to bring to a party or make when you have company. The filling needs refrigeration, but it stores well and if you have leftovers (emphasis on “if”), they can last for several days. This cake doesn’t take that long to make and uses basic ingredients that are easy to find if they’re not already in your kitchen.

Raspberry Coffee Cake Ingredients

• Raspberries: Use unsweetened raspberries for this (in other words, no sweetened purees).
• Lemon juice: Lemon juice helps keep the flavor of the raspberry filling nice and light after cooking.
• Sugar: Raspberries can be a bit tart, so sugar helps sweeten the mixture. Plus, as the sugar melts, the whole mixture will become more like thick syrup or jam.
• Cornstarch: This will thicken the filling.
• All-purpose flour: All-purpose has the right protein and gluten level for the cake to have good structure once baked.
• Sugar: Sugar in baked goods helps them become more dense or cake-like.
• Baking powder and baking soda: Baking powder makes the batter rise. However, here you’ll want to add that extra baking soda to work with the acidity from the sour cream. Using sour cream to flavor and tenderize batter can add too much acid to the mix, which neutralizes the baking soda in the baking powder. So, you add a little more baking soda in addition to the baking powder to help account for that extra acidity.
• Cold butter: Cold butter makes dough flakier.
• Eggs: These bind the ingredients for the batter.
• Sour cream: This makes the cake more moist and rich without adding a lot of extra liquid.
• Vanilla extract: This gives the cake a warm vanilla flavor that doesn’t compete with the raspberry filling.
• All-purpose flour: This gives streusel topping its crumbly texture.
• Sugar: This sweetens the topping.
• Butter: Butter binds together the flour and sugar, as well as the nuts.
• Chopped pecans: These add some crunch to the streusel topping.
• Confectioner’s sugar: This creates a smooth, white glaze that stands out on the streusel topping. Use confectioner’s sugar because the cornstarch it contains will prevent the glaze from dissolving into the warm cake.
• Milk: This turns the sugar into a drizzly glaze without making it too watery.
• Vanilla extract: This adds flavor to the glaze that’s warmer than that of just “sugar.”

Taste of Home