Blueberry Coffee Cake
Straight from the Olde Time Recipe Vaulte
Is there a recipe from your past you’ve misplaced and fear you’ve lost? Maybe you’ve tried to recreate the recipe without success?
(Have you ever had an editor or writing instructor tell you never to start an essay with a question?*)
I’ve just about recreated the cucumber salad my Grandma Jenni would make with Wiener schnitzel when she would come to visit. And I think I now have the ratios of yogurt, mustard and garlic my father would slather on a leg of lamb halfway through grilling. But those were dishes that never had actual recipes.
My most wonderful friend Kristin, however, lost her family’s recipe for blueberry coffee cake. This was a genuine-from-Maine recipe for blueberry coffee cake. Sure, there are as many recipes for blueberry coffee cake out there as there are blueberries in Sal’s ‘kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk’ bucket. But none tasted right. None rang the bell of memory with a big ol’ mallet.
(Her nephew, who also had lost some of the family recipe cards, had better luck and found them tucked in a Sibley’s Guide to Birds he found in his grandmother’s house. The house, which is located in Acadia National Park—her father used to be superintendent for the park—was nicknamed “Blueberry Ledge” thanks to all the lowbush blueberries surrounding her house.)
Kristin, like all smart people, repressed her feelings for this lost bit of her youth and soldiered on, willingly tasting blueberry coffee cakes wherever she went. That sort of stoicism would please her Puritan forebears. And Maine bears.
Then, lo! Her patience paid off. Last Sunday, at a friend’s house for the weekend (She, apparently, has other friends besides me. Hmmmph.), a warm blueberry coffee cake appeared at the breakfast table. One taste and she knew. This was the recipe. It may not have been written in her mother’s perfect cursive penmanship on a blue-lined 3 x 5” notecard, but that didn’t matter. I refuse to go all Proust-madeleines on you, but suffice it to say, she had a few pieces to make sure, and then asked for the recipe.
And then I asked her for the recipe. And she happily let me share it with you. This way we all will have it, in case she loses it again.
Please note lemon zest and vanilla were not in the original recipe, but was approved by Kristin, as long as I was willing to give her some of my samples. Please also note, this recipe is trés simple and can be whipped up in 10 minutes or so. Also makes a good dessert with some sour cream and fresh bllueberries on the side.
Kristin’s Blueberry Coffee Cake
Yield: 1 9 x 9” square coffee cake. Enough to feed my family with some grumbling that there isn’t enough.
What You’ll Need:
For the cake
4 tablespoons (2 ounces; 56.5 grams) butter, softened
3/4 cup (150 grams) granulated sugar
zest of 1 lemon
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup (4 fluid ounces) milk
1 1/2 cups (180 grams) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (95 grams) frozen or fresh blueberries (if using frozen, do NOT defrost)
For the topping
1/2 cup (100 grams) granulated sugar
1/3 cup (40 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
4 tablespoons (2 ounces; 56.5 grams) butter, cut into cubes and softened
What You’ll Do:
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Grease a 9” square or round baking pan.
With a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest together until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the egg and beat for 30 seconds. Add the rest of the cake ingredients except the blueberries (vanilla, milk, flour, baking powder and salt) and beat until the flour has just been absorbed. Fold in the blueberries. Spread the batter in the pan.
Make the crumb topping: Put all the topping ingredients in a small bowl and mash and toss them with a fork until they appear uniformly crumbly. At this point you may use your hands to combine the mixture further until it resembles moist sand. Sprinkle the mixture over the cake and bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Let cool. Eat warm or at room temperature. Put this recipe somewhere safe. Like in your copy of Sibley’s under “bluebirds” so you don’t forget where you put it.
Your turn: What recipes are you wishing you still had? I’d love to try to re-create them for you. Have you had success recreating recipes? I will be focusing on old family recipes on and off throughout the summer. I’m being sent an amazing gift from a reader of family recipe cards that should be arriving today. I cannot wait to dig into them.
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*They are correct. I am always warning my students away from this cheap and easy way into an essay. But mebbe, just mebbe, like exclamation point use, it is okay to use now and then. What do you think?!?!?!
This post is timely for me. Yesterday my husband and I gifted his daughter her grandmother’s recipe box as a wedding gift. She nenver met that grandmother, who died in 1977, but had grown up on stories of its treasures. Most of the cards’ notes involved Crisco or gelatin, but a few surprises popped up ;)
I live in SoCal where growing blueberries is hard, but they are my favorite fruit so I’ve been babying some Zone 9 bushes and this year may actually harvest more than 100 before the raccoons beat me to them. We struggle.
And - finally, thanks for sticking with me this far - my Sicilian maternal Nana made a lemon cookie that took A LOT of lemon parts/eggs. That’s all I remember besides the fact hat they made a mean ice cream sandwich. None of my 13 cousins have the recipe; my mom searched her family’s memory vaults for years since 1980 when it was last paraded; and now we hope others have an idea... Big hugs to anyone who’s got an inkling!
Here’s my family recipe story. Grama Sarah (my dad’s mother) was known in the family for her mandelbrot. We kids ate them unwillingly because they tasted like cardboard. Our parents dipped them in coffee which made them palatable. Eventually my mother, whose baking skills extended to Betty Crocker mixes but who loved my dad, decided she had to learn to make the cookies he loved, so she and my dad and my aunt and my dad’s spiffy new cassette recorder (this was early 1970s) set up shop in Grama’s kitchen and recorded her as she baked. The tape eventually found its way to me, and the kids digitized it for me, but I confess that I have never actually MADE that recipe, because instead of butter my dear Grama Sarah used...are you ready?...CRISCO. So when I make mandelbrot for family gatherings, I do not use the family heirloom recipe. I call them mandelbrot but in fact they’re the biscotti from the Chez Panisse cookbook - made, of course, with butter. Lots of butter. Mmmmm good.