Avid Baker's Challenge: Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake

July's Avid Baker's Challenge cake was the swirlific Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake on page 100 of Flo Braker's Baking for All Occasions. I've been feeling all caked out lately so I was planning to skip this one, but after reading about my fellow ABCers experiences I decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did. As always, it was pretty easy to pull together and tasted great. The dough was light in texture and the spices were lovely. Enough to be noticeable but not too overbearing. And then, of course there was the sugary butterscotch topping. Yum.

Based on ABCers recommendations I upped both the spices and the amount of butterscotch topping. I made a couple of other changes by adding some pecans and baking the dough in two 6" rounds instead of one big pan. I had some problems with getting the butterscotch to caramelize properly in the pan (not sure if that was because of the added nuts?) so if I make this one again, I'd probably roll the nuts up in the spiral and then just do straight butterscotch in the pan. This might help keep the layers a little more separated as well.

I had the problem of grainy caramelized topping/butterscotch once before when I made a sweet potato pie with caramelized pecans  for thanksgiving last year, so I think I need to look into this a bit more to see why it's not coming together properly.

mise en place for the dough...so easy!

it was super sticky but I was hesitant to add too much flour for fear that it would get tough.
It didn't help that it was super hot and humid the day I made this.

with a little more flour during kneading, it finally came together...now it rises

mise en place for the butterscotch topping...

...which goes into the bottom of my two buttered pans

At this point I realized that having a slab of marble that I could chill would really help me when rolling out dough in the summer. The weather this day was hot and steamy and so the dough was super soft and hard to work with. Rolling it out was mostly fine, but slicing it into strips, lifting the strips and then trying to coil them into the two pans was a nightmare! Things would have gone a lot smoother - and been much prettier - if I was working with chilled dough (or it was winter). But oh well...it all tasted fine in the end.

the dough is rolled out and a butter-spices mixture is brushed on

finally into the pans and ready to rise again

the spices smell amazing

pretty!

once you flip the rolls out onto a plate their sugary topping is revealed

yum!

The dough was light and tender and the topping was was sweet and nutty.
All I need now is a cup of coffee.

Bye for now...