Erin Mann is baking a new cake every week for a year from the "All Cakes Considered" cookbook and shares her adventures here on AnnArbor.com. Read past columns here.

For the next three weeks, the cake project will shift its focus to coffee cake. I'll admit, when I opened the cookbook this week and learned I'd be baking a trio of coffee cakes, I wasn't too excited.

My knowledge of coffee cake was limited, and what I did know stemmed from childhood memories of my mother eating a slice of Entenmann's coffee cake for breakfast with a cup of tea. She loved the stuff and I couldn't understand why.

It certainly didn't look like cake - what was that crumbly stuff on the top? As far as I was concerned, if it didn't have frosting, it wasn't cake, and I wouldn't like it. I've spent my whole life never giving coffee cake a chance. Would the Barefoot Contessa's Sour Cream Coffee Cake squelch my skepticism?

If you like to cook you're probably familiar with the Barefoot Contessa. Long before Ina Garten became the woman behind the empire of cookbooks, food products and the popular television show, she worked as a budget analyst in Washington. Looking for a change of pace, she said good-bye to her days as a White House staffer to own and operate a gourmet food store in the Hamptons. After selling the shop some twenty years later she published her first cookbook. If you'd like to try the Barefoot Contessa's Sour Cream Coffee Cake, you can find the recipe here.

Having made a streusel topping a few weeks ago for the sweet potato pound cake, I knew making this streusel would be a piece of...er, easy as pie. From the German word meaning "something scattered or sprinkled," streusel is a combination of flour, butter, and sugar and sometimes spices or nuts used as a topping for cake, muffins and other baked goods.

It's also a very fun word to say: strooooo-suhl. Try it in your best German accent. Don't be shy! I went out of my way to say it as much as possible. "Time to make da streusel." "Where's the cinnamon for da streusel?" I was going for Heidi Klum but in reality sounded more like Da Govna.

Like the cake from Week 1, this cake contains sour cream. I'm not a fan of sour cream as a condiment but I can do sour cream in cake. This recipe is the first in the book that called for cake flour instead of all-purpose. Those two ingredients produced a toothsome tang and tender texture.

A simple glaze of confectioners' sugar and maple syrup was drizzled on top. I deviated from the recipe a little and added a couple drops of maple extract to the glaze intensify the maple flavor.

We had friends over for dinner later that night. When it was time for dessert, the cake didn't stand a chance. We devoured all but two slices!

Erin Mann is a contributor to AnnArbor.com and a lover of all things cake. E-mail her at SheGotTheBeat@gmail.com to share baking tips or to swap recipes. Follow her on Twitter for cake project updates.