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“I can cook, but I can’t bake.”
Have you ever said that? For those who have no kitchen experience, it might not make much sense. However, when you get a little culinary practice, you can see the wisdom of those words.
Cooking is a general term applied to food preparation, but when folks use it this way, they mean something different. Cooking is often considered an art form, where the person doing the cooking has a lot of flexibility in deciding how the recipe will taste. Is the meat a little boring?
A cook finds a new marinade or sauce to make it more interesting. Can’t stand cumin or another spice? A cook will add a different spice to adapt the recipe for his own preferences. Those who cook well can prepare food on the fly, changing, adapting, and learning as they prepare food.
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Blueberry Buttermilk Breakfast Cake Recipe
Our recipe for Blueberry Buttermilk Breakfast Cake is sweet, tender, and delicious. However, it’s also a good starting point for making a recipe your own. You may want to bake it “as is” the first time to get used to the recipe, and in the future, you can swap things up.
Equipment
- 9-Inch Baking Pan
- Electric Mixer
- Medium-Sized Bowl
- Small bowl
- Spatula
Ingredients
- ½ cup Softened Butter or 1 stick
- Zest of a Lemon finely grated
- 1 cup Sugar plus 1 tablespoon for sprinkling
- 1 pc Egg
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla
- 2 cups Flour set aside 1/4 cup of this to toss with the blueberries
- 2 teaspoons Baking Powder
- 1 teaspoon Salt
- 2 cups Blueberries fresh or frozen
- ½ cup Buttermilk
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease and lightly flour an 8 or 9 inch baking pan. You also can use butter to coat the pan and toss a few tablespoons of flour into the pan, shaking it to distribute the flour.
- Using an electric mixer, beat the butter with the lemon zest and 1 cup of sugar. Beat these together until they are light and fluffy. Crack the egg into the bowl, add the vanilla, and beat again until the mixture is a cheerful yellow color.
- If you are using fresh blueberries, toss them with the ¼ cup of flour in a small bowl. If you are using frozen berries, you can skip this step.
- In a medium-sized bowl, stir together the rest of the flour, the baking powder, and the salt.
- Add half of the flour mixture to the batter, using a spatula to stir it, just until combined. Add the buttermilk and stir.
- Add the rest of the flour mixture, stirring again, just until blended. Gently fold in the blueberries and flour mixture.
- Spread the batter in the pan, spreading it gently in an even layer. Sprinkle the extra tablespoon of sugar over the top of the batter.
- Bake the blueberry breakfast cake for 35 to 45 minutes. If you use the smaller size pan, you will need to bake it a bit longer. Use a cake tester to make sure that the cake is fully baked in the middle.
- Let the cake cool for about 15 minutes before cutting it into squares and serving it slightly warm. Refrigerate leftovers covered in plastic wrap or aluminum foil for up to 3 days.
Notes
Baking is a cousin of cooking, but rather than an art form, baking is more of a science. When you bake, things like having enough leavening to make your recipes rise are actually really important. That means when you’re baking, you have to carefully measure ingredients and make sure that you’ve added enough of everything. “Eyeballing” ingredients when you’re trying to bake something means that your pancakes may be flat or your bread may take all day to rise.
And this is what someone means when they like cooking but not baking. They like the free spiritedness of cooking, and dislike the careful measurements of baking.
If this is you, maybe you should revisit the issue. Yes, baking does require that you take special care to measure, but once you get the hang of the basic proportions, you may find that baking is more fun than you thought.
Check out several quick bread recipes. Chances are good that they all contain similar amounts of flour (usually 2 cups), salt, baking powder, and sugar. The recipes probably all contain similar amounts of fat (usually ½ cup) often in the form of butter or oil, a single egg, and some milk or buttermilk. Once you understand the basic quick bread recipe, you can try to get a little more creative.
You may want to use apples instead of blueberries. Add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the batter. Our recipe has lemon zest. Why not try orange zest? Maybe you want a thick layer of a streusel topping on top of it instead of a light sprinkling of sugar. You can get creative when you are baking, but you just have to keep the basic quick bread part of the recipe the same. Even if your experiment is a flop, who cares? The important thing is that you tried something new and found out what didn’t work. Try a different approach the next time.
Don’t be afraid of baking! Just learn to quickly and accurately measure ingredients, and then you can get creative. However, you should definitely whip up this recipe as written at least once. It is tasty and perfect for a potluck brunch at work.
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