Name: Grandma's Peach Crumb Cake
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 50 min
Total time: 60 min
Ingredients: 1/2 Cup Milk; 1 teaspoon Vinegar; ----------------------------------------; 3 Cups Flour; 1 Cup Sugar; 1 Cup softened Butter (Margarine or Crisco Shortening); 1 teaspoon Salt; ------------------------------------------; 2 Eggs; 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla Extract; 1 teaspoon Baking Powder; 1 teaspoon Baking Soda; -------------------------------------------; 2 15 ounce Cans of Peach Halves or Slices, drain and reserve liquid

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My Mom made the best peach crumb cake I’ve ever eaten. No lie! BEST… EVER!

We call it Grandma’s Peach Crumb Cake now because my sons make it for their families and they need a more accurate title – it all gets confusing once the Mom becomes the Grandma, and even more confusing when she’s also a Great Grandma! But it’s still my Mom’s peach crumb cake and she gets all the credit for inventing it.

Since this is my birthday week (umm yeah, I’ve stretched it all the way through the entire week… you can get away with that when you’re old) I figured it was the perfect time to revisit the cake I requested every single year for my birthday when I was growing up. I know it’s probably not your birthday, but it IS Tuesday Treat day, so you have the perfect excuse to whip up the peach cake!

Here’s one little picture to get you hungry while I launch into the drama that goes hand in hand with this recipe. Ready? Here it comes!

Ok, now that you’ve had your teaser, here’s the story.

My Mom came up with this recipe back in the early 50’s. She was great at taking bits and pieces of things she liked in several similar dishes, and then combining those bits into one bodaciously delicious dish. And that’s what happened with this peach crumb cake! She loved the crumb topping on one cake and loved the moist, dense coffee cake texture from another. She didn’t like cinnamon in yet another cake but she did love the way that a hint of vanilla complemented the peaches in yet another dessert. Oh and she didn’t want to spend all afternoon peeling and pitting peaches, so she used canned peach halves, which required more modifications in order to keep the final cake from getting too soggy.

And that’s how this cake came to be! I loved it so much that I started asking for it for birthdays by the time I was 5.

Then my youngest sister grew up and started attending high school home economics classes and that’s where it all went pear shaped for my Mom’s peach crumb cake. There was only one copy of this recipe, in my Mom’s handwriting and it resided in Mom’s recipe box. Well, my sister Nora asked my Mom if she could take the recipe box to school for a Home Ec project. My Mom agreed, on the condition that she bring it back home by Friday of that week. Nora said ok and the recipe box went out the door with her.

Fast forward to several weeks later. My Mom, who rarely needed to consult a recipe from the box since she knew almost all of them by heart, decided to make one of her less used recipes – a Monkey Bread that she’d cobbled out of the things she liked in Monkey Bread (yeah, that recipe is KILLER too!). Since it’s a yeast dough, she wanted to refer to the recipe to be sure she had the correct amounts of flour, sugar and yeast…

Ok, another little peek at the cake, just because you’ve patiently read along with the Smith Family drama.

Aren’t you glad you stuck around? And back to the ending to the story – it’s a good one!

…the recipe box was missing! She called me to see if I had moved it last time I was at the house. I assured her I hadn’t. She called my sister Gail…same answer. At that point she was panicking. Enter Nora, just home from school that day. It suddenly dawned on my Mom that she hadn’t seen her box since Nora had taken it to school nearly a month earlier. Sure enough, Nora fessed up that she had forgotten to pick it up from the teacher.

Long story short, because I know you want me to just get to the recipe, they both talked with the teacher and scoured the Home Ec room but it was no where to be found.

My Mom promptly grabbed a notebook and started transcribing recipes from memory, then called Gail and me to get any recipes we had in our own recipes boxes. (we had quite a few!) but no Peach Crumb Cake recipe. We all pitched in and tried making it from memory, but the results were abysmal. Too doughy, too soggy, the crumbs were all wrong, the peaches sank to the bottom of the cake batter. It was too sweet or not sweet enough. Ugh, for months we tried and we just couldn’t get it right.

All that happened in 1977 and for the next 27 years we had to do without Mom’s peach crumb cake. Then one day, after spending hours searching the internet for anything resembling that recipe and coming up short, I had an idea. I decided to walk in my Mom’s shoes back when she created the recipe. I started with several peach cakes, crumb cakes and peach crumbles. I noted the things I liked and didn’t like as I made each recipe. I remembered clearly that two things made her recipe different from the rest:

She made the cake and crumb topping all at once, then scooped out a cupful of the crumbs for the topping and added the rest of the batter ingredients to the big bowl to make the cake batter itself.
Mom soured milk with vinegar, then added some of the drained syrup from the peaches to make up the total amount of liquid used in the batter.

When I stumbled onto ONE recipe that used the same method she used in step 1, I highlighted it and added it to my recipe. I never did find a recipe that used part soured milk and part peach juice, so I just improvised on step 2.

Once I had all the proper parts, I started making my peach crumb cakes. On version 3 I knew I finally had a winner – yep, NAILED IT! It looked and tasted exactly like my Mom’s peach crumb cake.

So now I get to have my cake and eat it too, once a year, on my birthday.

Ok, ok, I won’t make you suffer any longer, let’s just get right to the wonderfulness that is my Mom’s peach crumb cake, shall we?

First, the ingredients:

It’s a simple recipe to whip up in a jiff when a crowd shows up on a Saturday afternoon. If you don’t have canned peach halves, you can do what I did this week, use sliced peaches! See that butter in the pic? My Mom never used that. She used straight shortening because butter was expensive, but I’m a spoiled girl and like my butter, so I use a 50/50 mixture of shortening and butter…sorry Mom.

The first thing to do is to drain the peaches. They need time to sit and drain thoroughly. Don’t throw the juice down the drain, you’ll need some of it for the liquid in the cake batter.

While the peaches drain, mix up the crumb mixture, then reserve 1 cup of them for the crumb topping. Oh and be sure to add the vinegar to the milk so it has time to get nice and sour. I start souring the milk before I drain the peaches, but when it comes to writing a blog I’m old and forgetful and too darned lazy to go back and rewrite the last two paragraphs. I also refuse to apologize for being old, forgetful and lazy – you have been warned – don’t skip paragraphs or you may end up with a peach bomb cake instead of a peach crumb cake!

Now go preheat your oven to 350F and then mix in the eggs, baking powder, baking soda and vanilla. Give it all a quick stir, just to blend it together.

It will be very thick and clumpy. Don’t over mix it at this point, you still want a few lumps of butter and shortening in there to keep it tender! Time to add the soured milk and 1/2 cup of the reserved peach syrup, then stir it just till it forms a nice thick batter.

Now we’re gonna assemble the cake, come on along, it’s easy peasy…trust me! The batter goes into a well greased 9×13 baking pan, then the peach halves or slices are laid on top. I try to get at least one slice of peach per final cake slice, so that you get peaches in nearly every bite. If I have peach halves, I place one half per final cake slice – 12 halves = 12 final cake slices. You can toss them on haphazardly, but then some people might get a double helping of peaches and others might get none, and that’s not good…at least in the Smith family it’s not good. But maybe in your family you can get away with that, so do it if you dare. =)

Top the peaches with the crumbs you reserved. Don’t be shy, sprinkle them over every single inch of the peaches and batter, then pop the pan into the oven for 50 minutes.

When it comes of the oven, you must, simply must, let it cool in the pan for at least 30 minutes before you serve it. It’s even better when it’s cold. and twice as tasty the next day!

One more reminder of what you’ll be eating when you make my Mom’s Peach Crumb Cake. Just picture tender, juicy peaches on top of a not too sweet dense coffee cake that tastes slightly of vanilla. Yep, that’s my Mom’s peach crumb cake all right… oh sorry, as my kids say it “Grandma’s Peach Crumb Cake”. Sheesh, I’m getting old!

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