Fresh Cherry Sour Cream Coffee Cake

I made this fresh cherry cake for hubs for father's day and it turned out pretty good. We had it with coffee for breakfast.. He's not much of a cake person but he'll eat whatever I bake(ain't that sweet?) and I'm glad he liked this one. Since we no longer belong to the highly romantic, poetry writing category of couples; this is one way in which I feel I can show my appreciation for the things that he's done etc... Like how he let me pick out this baby-


when my home PC crashed and died quite a timely death; if you were to listen to my sons' "but it's 5 years old mom"lament -but for this mom, it was a 5 years well-served.. We went through a lot together that old PC  and I. It wasn't exactly with glee that I said goodbye; more like with a heavy heart kind of thing because I've got lots of stuff  stored on that PC, family pics, my daughter's drawings etc... Now I'm just waiting for salvage works to begin.......hope those much-loved sons of mine are reading this, haha. 

Now back to the cake:


I tweaked a recipe from this site for the recipe. The only changes I made was to use yogurt and some coconut cream in place of the sour cream and to add chopped walnuts to the topping. And oh, I made a real streusel topping with flour and butter, not just the cinnamon and sugar. Turned out nice and moist. My son Joe loved the streusel topping so much and was constantly picking at it that he would've left the cake "bald" if I didn't stop him in time, hehe.

Here's the recipe folks, if you'd like to give it a try:-

2 1/2 c. unbleached flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 c. butter, softened
1 1/4 c. plus 2 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 tsp. grated lemon rind
2 lg. eggs
1 c. sour cream
1 c. pitted and halved, fresh sweet red cherries
1/2 c. walnuts, chopped, med. fine
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

TOPPING:

1 tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a separate bowl stir together flour, baking powder and soda.

In large bowl cream butter, 1 1/4 cups sugar, vanilla and lemon rind. Beat in eggs singly until well blended each time. Gradually beat in flour mixture alternately with sour cream until blended and smooth. Stir together, in separate small bowl, the cherries, walnuts, 2 tablespoons sugar and cinnamon.

Grease and flour a 9 inch tube pan. Turn 1/3 (1 1/2 cups generous) of the batter into pan. Sprinkle with 1/2 of cherry mixture. Repeat layers ending with batter. Mix together topping ingredients and sprinkle on top. Bake on rack below center of oven for about 1 hour or until cake tester comes out clean.

Cool 5 minutes and turn out onto rack to cool.