Cafe Beaujolais' Buttermilk-Cinnamon Coffeecake

I don't know where Café Beaujolais is, although I guess it's probably in Los Angeles as the original of this recipe, which I found on Food Librarian, is found in the LA Times.

The method for making this coffee cake is slightly unusual to me, as it mixes oil into the dry flour and sugar mix. I haven't seen this in a recipe before, but I've read that cakes made with oil are more tender because the oil coats the grains of flour, preventing gluten forming. This method of adding the oil to the flour certainly seems to bear this out, as the cake was very moist and tender, and very light too.

The only change I made to the recipe was to use chopped pecans in the topping, when I found that both packs of flaked almonds in the storecupboard were so far out of date that they smelled rancid! I liked the combination of pecans and cinnamon, and I'm not sure that almonds would have been better.

Also, I didn't have the right sized baking tin - I used my adjustable square cake tin, set to 11 x 10", which seemed to be the nearest equivalent. Perhaps because of this change, I found the cake took 45 minutes to cook - a little longer than suggested in the recipe.

The cake was a little too sweet for my taste, but that's about the only fault I can find with it, and I'm really pleased to have found a good coffeecake recipe made with oil.