Two of your 5-a-day, surely...

I have bought a lot of blueberries recently, as they've been at a really good price at my local Lidl store.  Of course, that's not the only reason - they're also delicious, really good for you and mess-free.  And we all love them!  At least, we all did, until we ate our fill (and by we, I mean the rest of The Team).  So I'm going to stop buying them for now, and use them in things other than just cereal and yoghurt.

And so to the cake...

I saw this recipe Good to know, which is a suprisingly useful website that I rarely visit.  But I have signed up to various newsletters so get the info after all.  Anyway, the recipe is for Lemon & Blueberry Swirl Cake, to be made in a loaf tin or 20cm/8" round tin.  I have both, or so I though, until I went on the hunt for the loaf tin.  I even texted Mr Becca at work (but he had no idea where it was) and made an impassioned plea on our Facebook page, to no avail.  So round it was to be. 

This was good though, because it would give me a chance to try out another new technique I learnt from my new American cake friends, one that help the cake to cook level, not with a bump in the centre.  Once the cake is ready to go in the oven (topped with flour-coated fresh berries (so they don't sink), rather than jam in this case), wrap it in tin-foil coated wet paper towels.  Seriously.

So, to make the wrapper you lay out enough length of aluminium foil to go around the cake tin.  Then dampen some paper towel and lay it on the foil, like so

Fold in from the long edges, until it is the width of your cake tin's depth.

Then wrap it around your cake tin with the unbaked mix, and pop it into the oven.  This method keeps the edges of your cake cooler, so they don't bake so quickly.  In this way you stop the centre rising, because it is still baking and needs to expand. 

And if all goes well, your cake should look like this - fairly flat.

And because you flour-coated your blueberries, they haven't sunk (hooray!!) so your cut cake looks this tasty...

Buttermilk and blueberries = ??

At Christmas-time, I hadn't been able to find any buttermilk on the supermarket shelves.  No idea why, I can't think particularly what people do with buttermilk specifically at that time of year (all advice gratefully received).  I wanted it to make Red Velvet cupcakes, as I had thought the bright red sponge would look lovely at that time of year - ah well.  So when I found some last week, I snapped it up without thinking.

And the blueberries?  Well, me and the Team are great fruit eaters, especially berries.  We love them!  So when we saw blueberries on special offer at our local Lidl store, we snapped up a few punnets - yummy.  Most were eaten as a snack, but there was one punnet left this morning, plus the buttermilk.  This brought to mind a recipe I had just snipped out of a magazine a few days ago, for, you guessed it - blueberry pancakes.

Now, pancakes and I have a very long and chequered history.  Longer, in fact, than Mr Becca and I - which is Very Long Indeed.  The first time I can recall trying (very unsuccessfully) to make them was for a friend I was trying to impress while on a weekend away in Phillip Island, Victoria.  (By the way, if you ever get the chance, you must see the Fairy Penguin parade on this Island, superb!  Can't wait to take the girls there...).  They were an abysmal failure and I remembered that for a long time.  So Betty Crocker and I became good friends, and so did pancakes and I.

Until today, with the confidence born of the general success of my Becca Bakes exploits, and the blind faith of my loving Mini-2.  We weighed out and mixed up the ingredients

Then carefully inspected all the blueberries before adding them to the mix and whisking gently.

I need to figure out how to get them all even and looking good, as the egg shape wasn't foolproof.

So there was quite a selection of shapes from which to choose your favourite, ha ha.

Still, when placed on a plate and drizzled with pure Canadian Maple Syrup, neither Mini-2

nor myself were complaining.  Mmmm, with morning tea this tasty - who needs lunch?

Especially when Mummy lets you lick the bowl at the end...

Her favourite colour is pink

Our plan today was to try the Blueberry Cake from the first cookbook by the Hummingbird Bakery.  We had all the necessary ingredients, took them out from the fridge so they could get up to room temperature and away we went.  It needed 6 eggs, so we each added two (I did all the cracking, don't quite trust the girls with that job yet) and so on.  Daddy came in partway, to eat some chocolate wafers for a snack, and the girls lost interest in the cake at that point - ha, ha.  But they got interested again once I'd poured the mix in the tin and they got to lick the mixing bowl.  And when they saw this disaster...

Regrettably, things didn't improve much after nearly an hour.   The skewer came out clean, so I naturally assumed it was done.  It wasn't.  And worse still, we had wanted to take it with us on our visit to the great-gran and use it tomorrow for a friend's 5th birthday morning tea.

Still, I soldiered on and tried the Hummingbird's vanilla cupcake recipe but coloured the sponge pink.  Then topped it with some blue icing done not using a nozzle and made their own vanilla icing but in half quantity and coloured it apricot, and did use a nozzle.  Et voila, bonne anniversaire Monica (and no, she's not French, rather half Spanish).  So that should really say, feliz compleanos Monica!