Blueberry Traybake

I have a bad baking relationship with blueberries. No matter how delicately I coat them in flour, or how gentle I am while folding them into the mixture, they are on a high-speed one-way trip to the bottom of the tin. They still taste good though, and I suppose that’s what matters!

I found this recipe on Michelle’s blog Brown Eyed Baker. I was in a traybake kinda mood. Original recipe (Blueberry Boy Bait – heh!) is here.

What You Need:

For the Cake:
2 cups (240g) all-purpose flour, plus 1 teaspoon
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon table salt
2 sticks / 227g unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup / 135g packed light brown sugar
½ cup / 100g granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 cup whole milk
½ cup blueberries (I picked up a small punnet of blueberries in SuperValu which was just about 1 cup)

For the Topping:
½ cup blueberries
¼ cup (50g) granulated sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

What to do:

Whenever I see a recipe with ‘American’ measurements for butter, I’m a little wistful. What on earth is a stick of butter? And why can’t we buy butter in ‘sticks’?

So, for the record, a stick of butter is 113.5g. And out come the scales.

This recipe made me very happy. Two sticks of butter is exactly 227g. And look! Avonmore unsalted butter comes in a 227g pack.

Maybe it is a bit sad that I am excited about packets of butter. But as you can see, we get through quite alot of butter around here!

Back to the recipe. Arrange the oven so there is a shelf in the middle, and preheat to 180C. Grease and flour a 13×9″ baking dish. I have a 12×9″ pyrex lasagne dish that did the job just fine.

Whisk together the 2 cups of flour with the baking powder and salt and set aside. Beat the butter and sugars together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, until just incorporated. Add one third of the flour (reduce the speed of your mixer right down, or else you’ll have flour everywhere) and mix until incorporated. Add half the milk and mix. Repeat with another third of the flour, the rest of the milk, and, finally, the last of the flour.

Toss the 1/2 cup of blueberries in the remaining teaspoon of flour and tip into the mixture.

Fold in the blueberries ever-so gently using a rubber spatula. Transfer the mixture to the prepared tin/dish and spread out evenly.

Scatter the remaining blueberries evenly on top. Even these blueberries, with a height advantage of a few cms, made it to the bottom of the dish during cooking. As I said, bad baking relationship with blueberries!

Mix the cinnamon and sugar together and scatter evenly over the top of the blueberries. This seems like quite alot of sugar, but it makes a fantastically crunchy topping. You can reduce the amount of sugar if you’re so inclined.

Pop it into the oven for 45-50 minutes, until the top is golden, and a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake emerges clean.

Cool in the dish on a wire rack for about 20 minutes, and then turn out of the pan (this is where we get a shot of all the sunken blueberries!) and cool completely (right-side-up) on the wire rack.

When cool, (or still warm if, like me, you can’t wait) slice into squares.

Simple, buttery, sugary, blueberry-y goodness!

Enjoy!