I found a recipe in Cooking Light for Strawberry Jam Crumb Cake.  It just sounds scrumptious, doesn’t it?  It looks pretty good too.  I have the week off and you know I can’t go more than a few hours without getting bored and baking something.  My immediate thought was to make cookies, and then brownies, and then I thought that maybe I should try and wean myself just a little bit off my dependence on the black gold that is chocolate and try something new.  And I’ve never made a crumb cake before (as least, I don’t think so, and if I ever did, I guess it was so terrible that I blocked it out) so I figured, why not?

Of course, I didn’t have any strawberry jam because what fun is baking if you actually have all the ingredients you need?  I did have apricot preserves, though, since I’d needed it for my spicy apricot chicken.  Works for me.

Now, I will say, that I’m pretty sure I did this recipe wrong.  I’m not sure how.  I followed directions.  I put in all the ingredients that were listed.  But instead of a batter, it was more of a….dough.  Seriously.  Maybe it was supposed to be like that, I don’t know.  But uh, seeing as how the recipe said to spoon some into the bottom of a pan, then layer the jam, then layer the rest of the batter, I didn’t think so.  But hey, the possibility of monumental failure has never stopped me before.  So I just adjusted—I poured all the dough–er, batter–into my greased springform pan, stretching it to cover all the edges as best I could.  Then I spread the apricot preserves over the top and over that I sprinkled the crumb topping and popped it in the oven.

It came out quite tasty.  Lemony, since I had replaced the vanilla extract with lemon, and moist, with the sweet preserves in the middle and a cinnamony, crunchy topping.  Josh loved it.  We had it for dessert along side steaming hot cups of my instant hot cocoa.  So…it was a delicious sort-of-failure.

I think I’ll try it again soon, but this time I’m going to try it with pineapple—perhaps an upside-down pineapple crumb cake?  The possibilities are endless.  Well.  maybe not endless.  But tasty.

You can find the recipe on Cooking Light.