Week 25: Blueberry Buckle

Blueberry Buckle

This selection is, once again, of my choosing. As I was paging through my Mom’s Best Desserts cookbook in the process of making our list, I saw a raspberry buckle recipe and fondly remembered my kids’ favorite Gerber baby food dessert: Blueberry Buckle! Consider it a bit of nostalgia for me, even though my kids didn’t get a cake with a crunchy crumb topping…it was baby food after all. Oddly enough, I usually tasted the food I gave them but have no recollection of tasting this particular baby food. It’s possible that since they loved it I didn’t feel the need to figure out what it was that they didn’t like.

Aubrey’s work schedule wasn’t the problem this week; we had another weekend away from home so we baked this on Thursday and took it with us, hoping somebody would appreciate it. A 9×13 pan is a lot of dessert, especially when you don’t know how many people are going to like it. We thought about halving it but agreed we would need more if it was really good.

What is a buckle, you might ask? Our cookbook states, “In buckles, the fruit is covered by a cake layer, which has a tendency to buckle and crack as it bakes. No problem: The crumb topping hides all while the cake layer becomes permeated with the flavor of raspberries. This is a casual sort of dessert, good to serve at brunch or whenever you might serve a coffee cake.” In my world, a buckle is a cobbler and a cobbler is a shortcake. I’m pretty sure Mom’s Best has the accurate versions but I am not going to change my expectations at this stage of the game!

We used the Mom’s Best Desserts cookbook again since this is considered a traditional American dessert. While the cookbook recipe is for a Raspberry Buckle, we substituted blueberries for the raspberries. Our other substitutions are as follows: half whole wheat and half all purpose flour for the flour; Sola to replace the sugar in the cake; Swerve brown sugar to replace the brown sugar in the topping; vanilla instead of almond extract in the cake.

Ingredients

Berries

• 6 cups fresh or frozen unsweetened raspberries
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

Cake

• 2 1/2 cups sifted unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) butter, at room temperature
• 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk or 1/2 cup plain yogurt and 1/2 cup milk, at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon almond extract

Topping

• 1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 4 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
• 3/4 cup sliced almonds

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9-inch by 13-inch baking dish.
2. To prepare the berries, combine them with the sugar and lemon juice in a saucepan. Heat over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Spoon into the prepared baking dish.
3. To make the cake, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg. Sift two more times. Set aside.
4. In the large bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add one third of the buttermilk alternately with one third of the flour mixture, beating well after each addition. Continue adding the buttermilk and flour in thirds until the batter is smooth. Stir in the almond extract. Pour the batter over the raspberries.
5. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the center of the cake is set but still soft.
6. To make the topping, while the cake bakes, combine the flour, brown sugar, and cinnamon. With your fingers, rub the butter into the crumb mixture until it resembles coarse meal. Toss in the almonds. Sprinkle the mixture on top of the partially baked cake.
7. Continue baking for 15 to 20 minutes, until a tester inserted into the cake layer comes out clean.
8. Serve warm or cool, directly out of the pan. Makes 10 to 12 servings.

Our Experience

We had a lot of ingredients to assemble, but, we always start with everything so we aren’t running around the kitchen in the middle of the process. The first item on the list, greasing the pan. I wrap my hand in plastic wrap before greasing any pan because I really hate getting shortening on my hands…eww (I’m weird about brown sugar too…it’s the stickiness I hate about that one).

I decided to use regular sugar, actually super fine sugar because it would melt quickly, for the blueberries. I didn’t know if the Sola would melt like regular sugar and, it was only 1/2 a cup. In fact, since I like my fruit a bit on the tart side, it was less than 1/2 a cup-probably 1/3 cup. I even sprinkled a little bit of citric acid in them after they cooked because they tasted sweeter than I like. They didn’t have to cook very long before the sugar melted. I was really careful while stirring, I only broke a few blueberries (that’s why the juice was blue even before we baked them). By the way, those blueberries would be pretty tasty on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream, all by themselves!

Creaming the butter and sugar is a typical first step for so many baked goods. I usually use the whisk attachment to cream them but I knew we needed the paddle attachment for the batter and I didn’t feel like switching them out so we started with the paddle. It was Thursday night and I’m just not very enthusiastic about baking on a work night.

This is another time we were so quick to assemble our ingredients that we didn’t give them a lot of thought. We have cake flour and probably should have used that instead of all-purpose since we were substituting half of the flour with white whole wheat, cake flour might have offset the denser texture we get when we use whole wheat. I don’t know if it would make a difference but we should have tried it since this is a cake.

Once the batter was finished, we poured it over the prepared blueberries and it was ready to bake. Once again, fairly simple dessert when it’s all said and done.

I was halfway through making the topping when I realized that I hadn’t “mixed” up my sugar substitutes…dang!! I am almost certain that our topping will have the “cooling effect” in our mouths that comes with using Swerve (erythritol) exclusively in anything, at least in larger quantities.

We baked it for 25 minutes, put the topping on it, and then baked it for another 20 minutes. It smelled really good.

Once again, this dessert should probably be served with a big spoon, not cut into squares.

What we liked.

Another fruit dessert that gets my thumbs up! Kip liked it and had several servings. My brother, Eric, liked it as well. It got thumbs up from Aubrey and Garrett and our friend Kelly too. Like Logan, several others didn’t try it due to the blueberry aversion. Logan isn’t a fan of blueberries at all, even though her toddler self would tell her otherwise!

If you haven’t figured it out or I haven’t told you often enough, I really love fruits in my desserts. I like this with blueberries (but probably like blueberry pie better). They had that little hint of tartness that I was hoping for. I also liked the cake topping because I like a cake more than a biscuit or crisp topping on fruit. Even though it was dense, it was most certainly a cake. It was really good and the blueberries kept it pretty moist which could have been a real negative since we used whole wheat and it can get dry. The crisp on top was one I could eat again, even though I usually don’t care for them.

What we would change.

I would like to try it with half cake flour and half whole wheat. We didn’t start out with switching the entire recipe out with whole wheat because we knew it was a cake and it is too dense to use whole wheat for 100% of the recipe. We might add a little bit more buttermilk too, in order to offset the moisture the whole wheat absorbs. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely a cake, it was just more dense than you might expect. I always like the nutty flavor and hearty texture of whole wheat so I’m not going to be the one to suggest using something else. Of course, the brown sugar Swerve gave us the cooling effect we were afraid of so, next time, we will probably use half Swerve and half regular brown sugar or another brown sugar substitute that is not erythritol. Most of the almonds toasted on the top as it baked but I might have toasted them just a little bit before putting the topping together so they would all be toasted.

I think this recipe would be fabulous made with tart cherries and use the almond extract. We were going to use the almond extract because it is supposed to go well with blueberries, but, a lot of people have visceral reactions to almond flavors so we opted for vanilla instead. If I knew the people eating it would be OK with the almond, I’d like to try it.

What we learned.

I think this is our first “crisp” topping. Most “crisp” recipes use oatmeal where this one uses flour. My least favorite fruit dessert is a crisp but I think I could handle this as the topping for a fruit crisp if I needed to make one. We are constantly learning how to use the different flours and sweeteners and with every bake, we figure something new out or are reminded of something we overlooked. We still have to remember to PAY ATTENTION…this baking thing isn’t for the non-committed!

Until next week, Happy Baking!