Summer is for Blackberries

After the chicken post, I was supposed to have two more recipes up within a matter of days. However, in my infinite winning, I left a bag of groceries at the store and didn't realize until the next day. Even better, this bag had some of the most important ingredients of the two recipes I just mentioned. Well, I finally managed to get my shit together enough to make the cake I was planning on. There is also a pasta recipe, but that has to wait because, yet again, I am an ingredient short. FML.

Blackberry Buttermilk Cake
Adapted from bon appetit.

3/4 cup butter (1.5 sticks) + more for greasing
2 1/3 cup cake flour + more for dusting
2 small packages of fresh blackberries
1/4 cup + 1 1/3 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
3 large eggs
2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp orange zest
1 cup buttermilk
powdered sugar (for dusting)

Whenever you're baking, it's usually best to let your cold ingredients come to room temperature before you start working (a notable exception being butter in pie crust). Once you decide to make this, let the butter, eggs, and buttermilk sit out for a while before you start assembling anything.


Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter the bottom of a 9" or 10" springform pan. Cut a sheet of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the same pan and fix it on top of the butter. Butter this parchment paper and then dust with flour, tapping out excess.

Arrange blackberries on this buttered, floured surface, and sprinkle 1/4 cup sugar over them.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda. In a larger bowl (or the bowl of a stand mixer) cream together the 1.5 sticks of a butter and the 1.33333 cups of sugar. Mix until this is pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Beat in vanilla and zest.

Reduce mixer speed to low (if that's what you're using) and add the flour mixture and buttermilk, alternating between the two, until all has been added to the bowl of butter/sugar. It tends to work out best to start and end with flour, but do what works for you. Divide the flour into at least 3 additions and the buttermilk into at least 2, but if you want to go even slower than that it should be fine. Important here: don't over-mix. Stop mixing once the flour has been just incorporated.

Pour cake batter over blackberries and smooth out the top. Place in the oven and set the time for 45 minutes because you'll want to check it at this point (it probably won't be done, but it might be). The cake is done when it is golden brown and bounces back when pressed with a fingertip.

When cake comes out, let it stay in the pan and place the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Run a knife along the edge of the cake and remove the sides of the pan. Remove the bottom from the pan and peel off parchment. Dust the top (blackberry side) generously with powdered sugar and let cool completely.

Notes

• I'm usually a brownie batter and cookie dough eater only - cake batter has never really done it for me. But holy god, this stuff was tasty. It will also be very light in terms of texture, almost like if whipped cream and cake batter had a baby. This is good, this is what you want.
• There was a ton of debate on the bonappetit.com reviews for this about the proper cooking time. The original recipe states that you need 1 hr and 25 min for a 9" pan, and 1 hr for a 10" pan. I'm using a 9" pan and my cake came out finished at 1 hr but I had to cover it with foil around the 45 minute mark or the bottom (non-blackberry side) would have burned. Just check it as you go to make sure things aren't burnt and don't be surprised if you end up cooking it for a little longer.
• I don't ever have the patience to wait for non-iced caked to cool so I ate a piece of this warm. It's delicious though I recommend adding a small scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Cost

• I got the blackberries on special at 2 packs/$5 and everything else is pretty much stuff you should have on hand so it's about a $5 cake.
• According to the source, this is a 10-serving cake at 410 calories per slice.