Sweet potato is the secret ingredient that makes this coffee cake super moist and delicious. It’s also loaded with dried cranberries, topped with a crunchy almond crumb topping, then drizzled with a sweet icing. A delightful way to get your beta-carotene in the morning.

Today bloggers have joined together to celebrate Sweet Potato Day. We’ve teamed up with Jane Maynard, Alice Currah and ONE to help raise awareness of the life changing affects of the Orange Sweet Potato. ONE, it is a non-partisan, grassroots advocacy organization, co-founded by Bono, that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.

Did you know:

Every year, poor nutrition claims the lives of more than 3.5 million children. That’s more than one in three of all child deaths.
2.3 billion children died in 2011 in part due to malnutrition.

No child should die from malnutrition. Fortunately, progress is being made by using new a technique called biofortification. A process by which crops are bred to deliver much stronger nutritional value. The orange flesh sweet potato was the first such crop to be introduced.

Sweet potatoes are widely eaten in Africa. An estimated 7 million tons are produced each year. However, they are usually white in color and low in vitamin A – an essential nutrient that prevents blindness and infant deaths. More than one in three African children is deficient in Vitamin A. The health toll is enormous: more than 600,000 children die from vitamin A deficiency every year.

A Ugandan breeder developed a new orange-colored variety of sweet potato that is loaded with orange-hued beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. More than 24,000 households received the orange sweet potato vine in Uganda and Mozambique between 2007 and 2009. The program resulted in increases in orange sweet potato adoption and consumption. Impressively, vitamin A intake by women and children as much as doubled.

Efforts are currently underway to reach more than a million households with this nutrient-packed orange-fleshed tuber over the next few years. And the orange sweet potato is just the beginning: experiments are underway to transform other staple crops like beans, wheat and maize with other life-saving nutrients like zinc and iron.

Isn’t that amazing. That a small change like growing orange-hued sweet potatoes can have such a huge impact on people’s lives.

So how can you help?

Helping is easy. Just Sign the Petition. The US spends less than 1% of the budget on foreign assistance. Now the smart programs that we spend so little on are at risk. Please take a minute or two to help.

For Sweet Potato Day, I decided to bake something using sweet potato. We love pumpkin chocolate chip bread because it’s so moist and tender, so I created a coffee cake recipe that uses mashed sweet potato.

This recipe makes a beautiful, tall coffee cake that rises high above the springform pan. It was taking forever for the center to finally get baked, so I decided to stick a metal skewer in the middle so it would bake faster. I think next time I bake it, I’ll divide the batter in to two 9″ cake pans and make double the crumb topping. Or bake it in my coffee cake pan instead.

If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been posting so many coffee cake recipes lately, it’s because my son asked me to make more coffee cakes for breakfast on the weekends. He doesn’t like breakfast very much. Most mornings he doesn’t bother to eat it. I’ll hand him a granola bar, but I often find it on the kitchen table after he’s left for school.

Since he asked me to bake him more coffee cakes, how could I refuse. Especially, since his I love coffee cake on the weekend too.

Featured Image for post Cranberry Sweet Potato Crumb Cake

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