Buttermilk blueberry cake

Tender, light, easy as pie to make...and eat. Seems plain... Everyone had seconds and thirds.  Finished in one sitting.

Adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible. Hers is a plain cake, mine builds on one that I used to love at the Stephen Pearce cafe. And it's a great way to use up spare buttermilk. It was eaten so fast I didn't get a chance to take a pic - so here's how it should look...

Image from BBC Good Food.

Cake
200g plain flour
180g caster sugar
110g butter
1 tbsp baking powder
4 egg yolks
140ml buttermilk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 punnet blueberries (120g) 1/3 reserved

Icing
150g icing sugar, perhaps more to taste and till correct texture
120g cream cheese
40g unsalted butter, very soft
Reserved blueberries

Bake for 30-40 mins at 170 c
9 inch spring form tin

Using electric whisk, whisk butter into dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients together and add slowly.
Beating all the time. Pour into lined tin. Cook till golden on top and cooked through. Cool thoroughly before icing.

To make icing beat icing sugar and butter. Carefully mix in cream cheese, do not overmix. Decorate with remaining blueberries.

Sugar-free american fruit muffins

Healthy cake. Which actually tastes good. Bring it on!

After OD'ing on sugar last night and with multiple half eaten over ripe bananas scattered around the house courtesy of my children, these were just the ticket for a family breakfast. Adapted from Beth Hensperger's Bread for Breakfast

Preheat oven to 170C. Oil 12 cup muffin tin.
2 cups wholemeal plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 mashed bananas
juice of 1 orange
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs 
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup sunflower/ canola oil


1/2 cup chopped pecans or 1 cup fresh blueberries - or a combination of both.


Combine dry ingredients with a balloon whisk. Combine wet ingredients with the whisk. Fold the wet into the dry ingredients. Add nuts or blueberries and fold gently in. Do not over mix. Spoon into the muffin tin. Bake for 20 mins until risen, golden and not wet dough inside when tested with a skewer.

Serve by themselves or with butter and a drizzle of honey.

All American Blueberry Muffins

For Gill

For me America is the land of baking. Pancakes, brownies, cookies, whoopie pies. They are the stuff of dreams to an Anglo-Irish girl brought up on lardy cake, scones, crumpets and victoria sponge. The summit of America's baking achievements for me is the blueberry muffin. The ease of making, the simplicity of method, the crazy indigo of the vibrant berries in the light crumbed cake. Blueberries in Europe are never as good as American ones: ours are meaner and less flavoursome. But still each time I eat one I feel I am transported back to my first bite, in America, aged nine.