I want to sneak this recipe in before the strawberry season is over.   This is an easy yeast dough coffee cake with fresh strawberries baked on top – a good starter recipe for anyone who is intimidated by yeast dough.  The kuchen is best eaten soon after it comes out of the oven, because the strawberries on the warm dough are a particularly tasty combination.  “Kuchen” is the German word for cake, but this recipe of my grandmother’s was more of a breakfast coffee cake or tea bread.

We had a big strawberry patch when I was growing up and there was a two-week season in June when we picked strawberries every day.  It is hot, itchy, back-breaking work – the kind of labor that makes a person want to go to college so they never have to do such hard manual work again.   During one particularly hot summer, a spark from a nearby rubbish burner drifted into the straw placed around the plants and the entire patch caught fire.  I remember my brother and I cheering while it burned, which did not sit well with our father.  We were sent for hoses, but it was a long way from the nearest water to the strawberry patch, and by the time we got there, the patch was gone.  C’est la fraise.

Two quarts sliced strawberries

(Farmer’s market strawberries are the thing you want here – the sad greyish-red things that pass for strawberries in some grocery stores don’t have enough flavor to merit the effort of a kuchen.)

Prep time: thirty minutes plus one hour for yeast to rise

One kuchen serves 6

This recipe makes two nine-inch kuchens (Please note I used 2/3 of the dough to make one really big kuchen for the photo, just because I wanted to use the scalloped pie plate, and the other 1/4 of the dough to make a mini-me kuchen.  Don’t want to create a false impression about the size of kuchen you’re going to get!)