Blueberries though? Not usually my thing. But I know they are a lot of people’s thing, and who doesn’t like a good blueberry muffin, right?
Buckle cakes are essentially a variation on coffee cakes, with streusel on top, but include fruit. You really could just call this a blueberry coffee cake, but buckle is more fun and makes it seem like maybe you worked harder than you actually did.
Ingredients
Cake
- 1 ½ cups sugar
- ½ cup butter, softened to room temperature
- 2 eggs
- 2 t vanilla
- 4 cups flour
- 3 t baking powder
- 1 t baking soda
- ¼ t salt
- 1 cup milk
- 4 cups fresh blueberries
Streusel Topping
- 1 ½ cups sugar
- 1 cup flour
- 1 t cinnamon
- ¼ t allspice
- 11 T butter, cold
Directions
Butter and flour and a 13” x 9” baking pan and set that aside and we’ll start with the cake part.In a large bowl, put the sugar and softened butter and beat until smooth, just a couple minutes. Add in the eggs and vanilla beat again until everything is well combined and set this bowl aside.
In a separate bowl put the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and whisk until well combined. Get your bowl with the sugar mixture and add in half this flour mixture and mix until just combined. Next, add half the milk and mix again. Then mix in the rest of the flour mixture and finally add in the rest of the milk and mix that until everything is just combined (you don’t need to overmix). Put aside your mixer – you’re done with that.
Add the blueberries to the batter and, with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula, carefully combine them. Don’t get too aggressive with it – you don’t want to break the blueberries. You may very well end up breaking some and that’s perfectly fine, but try to keep it to a minimum.
Pour your batter into your prepared baking pan and set that aside.
Now, onto the streusel topping which honestly is always my favorite of any coffee cake. Er, I mean, buckle cake. Well, both.
Add the sugar, flour, cinnamon and allspice to a bowl and whisk together until well combined.
Take your cold butter, cut it into small cubes and add it to your sugar mixture. Now you need to combine them but you don’t want to use a mixer because you want the butter to stay in pieces, rather than melt together with the other ingredients. If you have a pastry blender, use that. I don’t, so I used a potato masher and that worked perfectly fine. If you don’t have either, take a couple knives and use them. The goal is to combine everything so that the mixture is crumbly. It will NOT be smooth – there will still be bits of butter.
Take your streusel topping and sprinkle it evenly over the batter.
Bake at 375 for about 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean and the edges are a nice golden brown.
Transfer the whole pan to a wire rack to cool, but feel free to have some warm as well. It’s really good warm, especially if you add some ice cream to it.
Ugly Desserts 