Blueberry Streusel-ish Cake

We drove down to a local place that sells blueberries today. The original plan was to do the U-Pick option, but it got hot earlier than we planned. So we just grabbed a couple of pints out of their refrigerator, drank some soda from their old-fashioned soda machine (glass bottles!) and headed home.

Then, I decided that it wasn't enough to toss a few in my mouth every couple of minutes and let the juicy sweetness pop in my mouth. It wouldn't be enough to have them on my breakfast cereal. Maybe it would be enough if I made a blueberry cake of some kind for dessert.

I looked up a bunch of recipes online, and, in my usual fashion, combined about 5 to make this (I don't have corn syrup, which my favorite candidate called for; I wanted to use either yogurt or sour cream...etc, etc).

The streusal recipe I found sounded interesting - much wetter than anything I've used before. "Unusual" = "Must Make Immediately". It was very sweet rich, but the cake ended up being not too sweet and very light, so they actually went together very well.

Oh, and then I went to get my flour and discovered that the weekend's festivities used my stockpile (we're talking a brand new 5 pound bag, here) of all-purpose. So i used self-rising, left out the baking powder I had planned on and halved the baking soda.

Blueberry Streusel-ish Cake

Batter:1/2 cup margerine
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup fat free sour cream
2 cups self-rising flour, sifted
1 tsp baking soda

1 cup blueberries
1 Tbsp sugar

6 Tbsp (3/4 stick) butter or margerine
1 cup brown sugar, packed
2 Tbsp ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts

Heat the oven to 350F.

1. Make the Batter: Cream together butter and sugar; add eggs and vanilla, mix thoroughly. Add sour cream and mix to combine. Add flour and baking soda and mix thoroughly.


2. Make the Blueberry Batter: In a food Processor, crush blueberries and 1 Tbsp sugar. Transfer to a small bowl and stir in 1/2 cup batter.


3. Make the Streusel: Melt the margerine in a small bowl in microwave. Add brown sugar and cinnamon and stir. It's going to be very pasty at this point. Stir in walnuts.


4. Grab a bundt pan and coat it with nonstick spray. Press the streusel evenly around the bottom. Pour 1/2 of the batter on top. Drop the blueberry batter evenly around the top of that layer. Spread the remaining batter on top of that. The blueberry layer showed around the edges of mine, which means I probably didn't do too good of a job halving the batter. Math was never my strongsuit.


5. Bake for about 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out mostly clean - a few moist crumbs are fine. Immediately invert on a cake plate. You may have to scoop half of the streusel out of the pan and put it back on the cake, but that's ok. Or at least, I think it's ok.

Notes: I think I'd go with a more traditional struesel topping - this was a little too rich for me. The Professor and the teenagers in residence thought it was great, though, so your mileage may vary.