Coffeecake for Christmas just

	With its butter-crumbly streusel topping, fresh-baked coffeecake looks and tastes just right for a season celebrating family and home.

has to be homemade

FOR AS LONG as I can remember I have been passionate — OK, fanatical — about making things from scratch. Don't get me wrong; I'm no Martha. It isn't about making things perfectly, just about making them. Even if a packaged product is better than what I can make myself, I still prefer to whip up something from nothing.

When I lived with my parents and my eccentricity was just budding, it tried my family's patience. Most of our food was homemade in those days anyway, but for special occasions, we liked to splurge on store-bought bakery items; homemade was regarded as a measly second-best.

I made pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving using fresh pumpkin instead of the traditional canned stuff. And since I was unaware that the varieties of pumpkin used for baking are a little different than the stringy, watery-fleshed pumpkins grown for jack-o-lanterns, my pies left something to be desired.

When I volunteered to make the annual Christmas coffeecake, they were all dubious.

Pumpkin Streusel Breakfast Cake & Streusel Topping

"Why don't I just pick up a couple of those good Sarah Lee coffeecakes we all like?" asked my Mom. "You've already volunteered to bake the rolls and you've been working so hard on all those cookies; I think you need a little break."

"But I want to do it!" I said. "I think we should have homemade coffeecake on Christmas. It'll be just like 'The Waltons.' " I was referring to the TV drama about a rural family surviving the Great Depression. Survivors of the '30s themselves, and having worked pretty hard to bring us into a nice suburban lifestyle, my parents didn't share my feelings about the good old days when everything was made from scratch.

"Well, you go ahead and make a coffeecake if you want," said Mom, not wanting to squelch my creative impulses, "but I'll get a couple of store-bought ones just in case." Just in case what, I wondered. Just in case mine is horrible?

I pulled out "The Joy of Cooking" and went to work on a fancy cinnamon-swirled cake made with yeast dough and finished with a powdered-sugar glaze. On Christmas morning my coffeecake was placed alongside the perfect specimens from the grocery freezer case. I was pleased to note that they looked tawdry in their crimped foil pans. My cake, on an old china plate that had belonged to my mother's grandmother, fairly glowed with homemade charm. But when I tried the store-bought cake, I grudgingly noted that it tasted better somehow — sweeter, moister maybe. I had not quite achieved mastery over the mass-produced. But I was getting there.

"I've got to admit," said my father, "this coffeecake you made is almost as good as store-bought."

"Almost as good as store-bought." The phrase haunted me for years. Every year, I tried to do better.

"You made this from scratch?" my aunts and cousins would ask. "It's almost as good as store-bought."

"Have you ever eaten that bread he bakes?" I heard one of my mother's bridge partners ask. "It's almost as good as store-bought." I longed for someone to say, "This is better than store-bought." My father noticed this, and it became a private joke between us.

Decades rolled by and a kind of food revolution happened. Most of us came to recognize that home-baked goods were considerably better than their factory-made counterparts. And all the while, I kept baking, cooking my way through Julia Child and Fannie Farmer, James Beard and Laurie Colwin, Madhur Jaffrey and Marcella Hazan, settling at last into a personal style that is more or less an amalgam of all the influences I absorbed along the way.

For Christmas with my own kids, I stopped making yeast-raised coffeecakes years ago and came to rely instead on a quick bread topped with streusel, a crumbly mixture redolent of butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. This year, I developed a recipe using pumpkin. Naturally, I eschewed the canned pumpkin and steamed winter squash from the farmer's market, though I did try it with frozen purée just in case I wanted to share the recipe with friends who aren't as crazy as I am about steaming their own.

But my family has never forgotten when homemade was not as good as store-bought. And whenever I serve him anything homemade, my father makes a point of saying with a twinkle in his eye, "Son, this is almost as good as store-bought." I'm tempted to Fed Ex a coffeecake to Pop in Florida just so I can hear him say it.