Blueberry Crumb Cake

by reenrene

[Irene] If you read our About page, you will know that this is the beginning of baking project, our attempt to bake 3-5 recipes a week. We both have a passion for baking and cooking. This love for food came from sharing our time and enjoyment with family in the kitchen and dinner table. Tim had come up with the idea, and since I love photography and he loves to write, we decided to begin a baking blog.

[Tim] Thanks for that introduction, Irene. Now, lets talk baking. This week, we learn valuable lessons about recipes. The recipe is vastly important, and vastly annoying, like paying your taxes, or cleaning up after your pooping baby. Keep these things in mind before you start your own baking blog:

1. Read, read, read the recipe. Beforehand. It’s amateur, yeah, but completely necessary. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to say, “Hey, I want to make a lemon tart tonight,” and then half way through, realize that you don’t have any sour cream because you didn’t read the freakin’ recipe. That happened here.

2. You better read the recipe. This crumble cake decided to be the mosquito that bites the tip of your nose, because it required buttermilk, which we didn’t have. Irene added lemon juice to milk, which gave us a substitute. But then I didn’t measure it, and added a cup of the stuff, rather than a half cup. My fault, but I wouldn’t have done it if I just had to measure buttermilk…

3. If you go off the recipe, you’re in for a bad time. So read it. Story: so we don’t have a food processor. Again, amateur. We needed it to combine the nuts and sugar for the crumble top, so we used a blender instead. The crumble overblended and turned into a mushy paste. Oh boy. We added oats and (groan) flax t0 get the right texture. If you’ve had flax before, you know how deceptive these cake look. If you haven’t then count yourself lucky, and be blissful in your food ignorance.

All our recipes will be from the following two books:

Chang, Joanne. Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2010. Print. Click

Greenspan, Dorie. Baking: From My Home to Yours. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print. Click