Alpha Bakers -- Blueberry Sour Cream Crumb Coffeecake

Keep your towering buttercream fortresses. I'll take a crumb cake loaded with fruit and buttery streusel any day. This is coffeecake in the best style, perfect for all-day eating. A soft sour cream butter cake, threaded through with a sugary nutty streusel, then topped with blueberries and crumbs. This is all that's needed to gain entry to the clubbiest Kaffeeklastch.

My colleagues...well let's just say they agreed. I was glad I'd had a square for breakfast, because by the time my coffee break arrived, it was no more. I followed the recipe fairly faithfully, only substituting almonds for walnuts in the streusel.

Alpha Bakers -- Blueberry Buckle

This was the picture, a classic American farmhouse dessert. Worked out fine except for the part where I didn't leave enough breathing room when dropping the dough on the filling and it never quite...baked. Very pretty, but too sweet and a little too much raw batter underneath.

Alpha Bakers -- Sour Cherry Pi

Adventures in pie this weekend. March 14 was Pi Day (3.14), always a fun day to celebrate. The Alpha Bakers were making Rose's Sour Cherry Pie, and since that is one of my favorite pies in the world, I was completely on board. I even knew exactly which Russian grocery to visit for my frozen cherries. Of course, it was all the way out on Kings Highway, and before I knew it I had just gotten lazy, and was scouring my local fancy bodegas for jarred cherries. Didn't find them, although I know about forty places where they can be found, so I changed things up and bought frozen sweet cherries and a plum or two to make Rose's Cherry Sweetie Pie. Despite uninspiring plums and a potato starch that thickened a bit too much, the pie was a more than reasonable stopgap for Pi Day. My co-workers, volunteers, and the kid who'd ventured out early for tutoring were pleased.

I had made two batches of crust--one of Rose's cream cheese crust and one of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds butter crust. To fill the second one, I used the bodega blueberries and a peach or two. Out of season fruit. Less than inspiring. Still, I had a bit of crust left, and so I finally caved, picked up a jar or two of sour cherries in syrup, and made two little Sour Cherry Pies, reducing the sugar to 50 grams. Those I ate all by myself. See that flakiness in the pie crust? Now I just want to keep on making pie forever. This always happens. One pie is just not enough.

Alpha Bakers -- Black & Blue (& Bloody) Pie

Why do I bake so much? The pursuit of attainable goals. I am in all things a procrastinator. Like Mr. Bennet, I'm "dilatory in undertaking business, [but] quick in its execution." I have trouble stirring myself to do things other people consider basic. I don't hang pictures on my walls. I rarely dust. Half of my furniture is broken. Once I begin a project, I am happy to have begun it, but it is terribly hard for me sometimes to begin even the simplest-seeming things. For this reason, I love structure. I love step-by-step guides and challenges and deadlines. And I love baking--quickly executed projects that use skills I enjoy, that produce tangible and pleasing results in a minimum of time. Low commitment, quick execution, ephemeral decision. It's not the only reason I love baking, but it does seem to be the one discipline I have where I am quick, decisive, and good at planning out my time. Baking gets me out of bed better than anything else--I will lounge if required to shower but happily hop up at 4am to preheat an oven--which has made bread baking a great structure to hang things like writing articles or papers, as the time constraints marry nicely. 

Add on the domestic goddess aura and a sexy if slightly nuts whiff of Little House self-sufficiency, and it becomes clear why this happens so much. Also, pie is delicious. 

This week's pie was the Black & Blueberry pie, a mixed berry with a cream cheese crust. Unlike some of the Alpha Bakers, I make a lot of pie, and I love it. I don't find pie crust daunting, and I like to make it with my hands. I don't mind runny fillings, (John Thorne says they're the way to go, and he's always right), and yet pie always carries with it a certain anxiety that doesn't come up in most other baking circumstances. 

Pie is more than a set of instructions. It's a skill. A physical skill. Because of this slightly mystical truth, pie gets a lot of reverence and a lot of fear. It's not hard, it's just not easy to get right. Pie can turn and bite you in the ass. Every pie is different. I realize that to the true baking personality (or the true librarian) this unpredictability can be painful, even destabilizing. Luckily, I'm more the kind of baker (and librarian) who is caught up in the story and careless of some details, so pie is my kind of game. Also, pie is so, so delicious. I would rather have pie than cake any day, but that's another story (never mind).

It's a story about fruit. We can talk about it when it is not winter any more.

Black & Blueberry pie. A fairly straightforward double-crust pie, made with Rose's cream cheese enriched pie dough. I like this pie dough, but it hasn't become my one and only. An all butter crust still has my heart. The cream cheese crust is very friendly, though, and holds a very nice shape without getting too tough. I can't bring myself to put it in and out of a bag and the freezer as Rose instructs (sorry Rose, I know your detailed instructions really do get unexpectedly perfect results, I just can't be perfect about pie. Talk to me when we're back to wedding cakes), but my hands-in technique yielded some quite acceptable pie crust action. Substitution alert: I misread the amounts I would need so the final product had subbed in mascarpone for 1/3 of the cream cheese (richer, but not devastatingly so), and I used leftover coquito (condensed milk, evaporated milk, coconut milk, and rum) for the three tablespoons of heavy cream. Alcohol is good in pie crust--some people swear by vodka.

I also mis-read the filling amounts a bit so the final mix was 12oz frozen blackberries and the rest frozen blueberries, with a handfull of cranberries and strawberries thrown in, making this a Black & Blue & Bloody pie (Black & Blue & Bloody new band name I call it). I didn't change the ratio of other filling ingredients because I judged it close enough, and so it was. I added the berries to the cornstarch (all right, it was tapioca), sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest straight from the freezer, then let the pie rest filled for roughly the recommended hour and had no problems. There were plenty of juices but it wasn't runny at all. I would have possibly opted for a runnier pie and a slightly less thick tapioca twinge, but that's a personal preference. It did run enough to resemble a very satisfactory crime scene.  

We had it for brunch, along with a very excellent quiche. My friend 'BeeBo,' below, is a big fan of blueberries.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Blueberry Sponge

This cake didn't start life as a blueberry sponge. It was meant to be a marionberry shortcake. However, I don't call it a shortcake unless it's a biscuit, contradictory as that may be, I reserve the right. This is a sponge cake, soft, sweet, delicious, and not a shortcake base. It was, however, just lovely with tiny Maine blueberries drizzled over it. The whipped cream, sadly, was sour, so didn't make it to the table.

The little sponges, made in cupcake wrappers, came along to dinner at Libby & Rob's where they were light finish to an amazing dinner. I love sponge cake always, and I hear that Whole Foods carries marionberries. I'll have to try them soon.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Plum, Peach, and Blueberry Upside Down Torte

Working our way down the 'Quick & Easy' list, we come to this simple cake, with a batter made in the food processor. In addition to quickness and relative easiness, this cake has adaptability, which came in handy when I ran low on sugar. I made only a quarter of the caramel recipe that lines the pan. Although that switch made it impossible for fill the pan with a caramel layer, I was able to sprinkle caramel in dribs and drabs, and that seems to have done just fine.

For the fruits, I used peaches and shiro plums from the farmers market, sprinkled with the last remaining blueberries from a huge Trader Joe's pack. The TJ blueberries weren't that great, but they did make up for it a bit in quantity, and cooked they just melted right into the plums and were great.

This was an easy cake to eat, a breakfast lunch and dinner cake, although Matt didn't seem that interested in helping me to eat it, so after a day or two on the counter I found the last quarter moldy.

Second Dinner, Hayseed Style

A guest submission from my sister, self-titled.

That's just how we roll in MA.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Blackberry Crumb Cake

Some weeks, the Blueberry Crumb Cake from Baking would have been a no-brainer. Nuts, crumble, berries...This week, though, I really had to work up to it, and never made it all the way to really enthused, good as it was. First, you see, I'm always a little suspicious of coffeecake--too much butter for too little reward? Why not just skip the cake part, put the berries under the topping, and call it crisp? Or even 'krisp,' as the Moosewood Cookbook insists.

So yes, coffeecake lovers, I'm that girl. The girl who would dare to skip the cake part. But for all of you out there, I didn't. I made it like Dorie said. And it was very good.
First I spun butter and nuts and flour and spice in the blender to become a streusel topping.
Then I tossed frozen blackberries in some flour.A half recipe fit very neatly into my usual custard pan, a little blue oval number from Ikea. I didn't refrigerate the crumbs, nor work all that quickly, so by the time I got to them the crumbs were less crumby than mushy, which may have changed the texture of the topping, but it still made a different layer in taste and texture, and worked well. The berry/cake ratio was more or less as Dorie recommended, but blackberries are messier things than blueberries, so there was more mixing, and the final batter was pleasingly purple.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream

This one wins hands down for the least time-consuming TWD recipe yet. Simmered a cup of blueberries with some lime juice, zest, and sugar, blended the mix with some sour cream and skim milk, chilled, and there you are. Ice cream that resembles frozen yogurt made with upscale Dannon blueberry. Very simple, very good, no eggs. I haven't been very good about making non-custard ice creams, which are usually better for us, because they don't keep as long in the freezer, but I think this one won't have long to keep. The household approved, despite initial skepticism re: sour cream.

In an overdose of cultured goodness, I also made buttermilk ice cream from the Lee Bros. cookbook, smitten by their idea of layering it with cornbread to make a parfait. The ice cream was a little bit chalky, but the taste was good. More to come from that cookbook, it's taken a real hold on my imagination.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Double-Crust Blueberry Pie