You will know by now that I can't resist adding to my cook book collection, mostly these days found in local charity shops.
Well, it happened again - this book came with an extra recipe, a clipping from a magazine tucked inside the book.
This has happened to me twice before. There was Sharon's Hotpot and Sandringham cake, both of which were magazine clippings that fell out of a secondhand book. I was compelled to make both of them and they turned out to be very good. My mum used to say that things come in threes so with the third clipping in front of me I just had to try the recipe!
The magazine that it comes from is Good Housekeeping and in fact you can see it on the internet here. It's proper name is "blueberry and sour cream loaf" but I changed it because the interesting feature is the crumble topping rather than the sour cream. In any case I didn't have any sour cream and rather than go out and buy some I used crème fraiche, which I did have.
The cake is made using oil instead of butter and in a very similar way to making muffins. It had a very light and fluffy crumb and unlike muffins was still good several days later. I thought the crumble topping looked a bit odd because it was not very brown, but in any case the cake was delicious.
Ingredients
For the topping
15g cold, unsalted butter
40g plain flour
15g demerara sugar
For the cake
50 ml vegetable oil
2 medium eggs
200ml sour cream or crème fraiche
2 tsp vanilla extract
200g self raising flour
175g caster sugar
125g blueberries
Method
Preheat the oven to 180C / 160 fan / gas mk 4. Grease a 900g / 2lb loaf tin or use a paper liner. (I used my small roasting tin which produces an oblong cake rather than a loaf shape.)
First make the crumble topping by rubbing the butter into the flour and stirring in the sugar. Set aside.
To make the cake, sift the flour into a large bowl, add the sugar and stir to combine.
Put the wet ingredients into a large jug and beat together. Pour into the flour mixture and stir until almost combined. Fold in all but a spoonful of the blueberries.
Turn the mixture into the prepared tin, scatter the remaining blueberries and crumble mixture over the top. Bake for about 50 minutes until done.
Cool in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out. Serve warm or cold.
Cuts into 10-12 slices.
A blueberry bake is always something to get happy about. As is crumble now I come to think of it, so that's a fine combination. I'm trying REALLY hard to avoid buying any more cookbooks because I genuinely don't have any more space but, in all my years of charity shop buying, I can't think of any that had interesting bits of paper in them. In fact, most of the books seem to have never been opened let alone used.
ReplyDeletePhil, I'm often surprised to find that so many apparently brand new cook books end up in charity shops. All the better for us, of course. But I am also running out of space and will soon have to operate a one in, one out policy when I buy more. Choosing the one to get rid of will not be that easy.
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