I love an everyday cake, although I guess that’s technically a misnomer here. This blueberry beauty is a torte, which essentially means that it’s a cake made with little (or sometimes no) flour.
So…I guess it is a cake? Not all cakes are tortes, but all tortes are cakes. So yes, Blueberry Torte is a cake. Glad we got that sorted.
(Sorry.)
Anyway…this Blueberry Torte is easy peasy and so good, you’re going to want to make it all summer long. And you absolutely should! It’s got a soft center, slightly chewy edges, and is literally bursting with fresh blueberries—what’s not to love?!
This is a spin on one of my favorite holiday desserts, Pear & Cranberry Torte. It’s so super delicious that I wanted to make a spring/summer appropriate version and, well, here we are.
The recipe begins with a simple cake batter. You’ll find many of the usual suspects here (softened butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, eggs), plus light brown sugar and the tiniest bit of lemon zest.
One ingredient you won’t find? Milk. There’s none in this recipe, so the batter is pretty thick for a cake…er, torte. This lack of liquid is also what gives us the almost cookie-like edges. Yesssss. If you’re worrying about this leading to a dry product, never fear—this torte stays plenty moist thanks to the butter and eggs, small amount of flour, and two full cups (12 ounces!) of blueberries that are pressed into the top before baking. They soften and sink into the batter while the torte bakes and become jammy and fragrant and it is stupid good and why aren’t you actively walking to the kitchen right now???
(Sorry again.)
Blueberry Torte doesn’t require any frosting or other flourishes and can be served up while it’s still warm. If, however, you want to jazz it up for a dinner party or you’re feeling fancy, you can give it a dusting of confectioner’s sugar, a dollop of whipped cream or a smattering of fresh blueberries. If you’re anything like me, you’ll need all three.
Sorry, not sorry.
Blueberry Torte
one 9-inch cake, about 8 servings
2 teaspoons fresh lemon zest (about 1 medium lemon)
1/2 cup granulated sugar + 1 tablespoon, for sprinkling
1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon Kosher or sea salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
2 large eggs, room temperature
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
12 ounces (about 2 cups) fresh blueberries
For serving (optional):
confectioners sugar
whipped cream
fresh blueberries
Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9-inch springform pan. Set aside.
Combine lemon zest, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, and light brown sugar in a small bowl. Use your fingertips to rub the zest into the sugar to release the oils. Set aside.
In a small-medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, use an electric mixer to cream butter until very light and fluffy (about 2 minutes). Beat in sugar mixture. Mix in eggs one at a time, followed by vanilla. With the mixer on low, mix in dry ingredients. Batter will be thick.
Spread batter into the prepared pan. Scatter blueberries over the top and lightly press them into the batter. Sprinkle the additional tablespoon of granulated sugar over the top. Bake 50-55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out with only a few moist crumbs. Let cake cool in the pan on a rack for 15 minutes before running a small, thin knife around the edge and releasing the springform.
Serve warm or room temperature with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar, whipped cream and/or fresh blueberries, if desired. Leftovers will keep covered in the refrigerator for a few days.
I’ll admit that my heart sank to my ankles when I was asked to make “something like” the Milk Bar Birthday Cake for a first birthday party a few weeks ago.
It’s not that I have anything against Christina Tosi or 
Long story short, I got it together, spent a lot of time looking at my copy of the 
I have little intention of making it again because who has that kind of time??? But I will make time for one element: the Funfetti crumb. It’s got all the buttery crunch you’d expect in a shortbread or crispy sugar cookie, but it’s as simple as making the crumb topping for a coffee cake. And it’s colorful and happy and just the tiniest bit salty. And, well, connect the (rainbow sprinkle) dots.
Double Funfetti Crumb Cake is exactly what it sounds like: tender sour cream Funfetti cake with a layer of Funfetti crumb baked on top. It’s the buttery, rainbow-speckled, no-cinnamon-allowed everyday coffee cake you didn’t know you wanted.
The cake is rich and dense, the crumb provides just the right amount of crisp-crunch, and the rainbow sprinkles (
What? We all know that person. We may not totally understand their tastes but we respect them, and now we can make extra-fun cake for them to show them how much we love them.
…this took a weird turn. Happy Friday, dear readers! Make yourself a cake this weekend!
Nobody throws a dinner party quite like my friend, David. He can make a multi-course meal for fifty without panicking for a second, and he’s been known to throw impromptu dinner & a movie nights for twenty without the slightest hesitation.
Both the man and his food are sophisticated without being pretentious—think ham smoked on his roof, cold salmon with dill & yogurt, habanero cheese grits, herby roasted potatoes, tomato & avocado salad with pesto, and a recipe for brussels sprouts that haunts my dreams. And that’s to say nothing of the things he can do with a Costco croissant and a bulb of fennel! I could go on, but the bottom line is that David makes unfussy food that is outrageously delicious, and if you are ever so lucky as to be invited for dinner at his apartment, you must must must go. If not for the main menu or the love of his three-legged cat, go for the Boterkoek.
If you have never heard of Boterkoek (pronounced “bow-ter-kook”), it’s Dutch for “butter cake,” and it’s about to be your new favorite dessert for any and all occasions. David is of Dutch descent and makes it frequently (usually from Heleen A.M. Halverhout’s 
As its name states, this cake is ridiculously buttery. It’s also sweet, simple, and the sort of thing that works just as well for dinner with friends as it does for delivering to new parents or keeping around to pick on over the course of a lazy weekend.
Boterkoek is made from a dough rather than a batter. It includes softened butter (duh), sugar, an egg, flour, vanilla and almond extracts, and minced candied ginger. There’s no leavener, but the final product isn’t terribly dense. I attribute that to beating the softened butter until it’s good and fluffy.
As with all of David’s go-to recipes, this one is decidedly unfussy. The most annoying part of making a Boterkoek is reserving a teaspoon of the beaten egg for brushing over the top of the cake. No bother, really. The thin layer of egg wash makes for a golden top, and a crosshatch pattern carved out with the tines of a fork gives way to crispy edges and a magazine-quality presentation.
I haven’t even mentioned the flavor! Boterkoek is rich and buttery with a touch of almond flavor and a little sharpness from the candied ginger. The texture falls somewhere between a cake, shortbread and a blondie—it’s best eaten with a fork when it’s warm, but can be handheld when it’s room temperature.
Boterkoek is what I like to call an everyday cake; it can be made easily with few ingredients, doesn’t require layering or frosting, and works for almost any casual occasion including, of course, a dinner party at David’s. Or, you know, watching Netflix in your oldest/best pajamas.
Either way, you shouldn’t skimp on the ice cream.
I’ll never forget the first time I found meyer lemons in a regular grocery store. It was 2010, and I was doing a last-second rush for supplies before a blizzard. I have no idea what I shopped for that day (my then-oven ran at least 150F cool, so options were limited), but I remember seeing a display of meyer lemons and thinking they were so…exotic. I had heard of meyer lemons, of course, but never seen them in the wild (er, Cobble Hill grocery store). Out of curiosity, I put a couple in my cart. I couldn’t begin to tell you what I did with them, but that is the probably-tedious story of how I came to love meyer lemons.
Fast forward nine years and I have used meyer lemons many, many times. I see them in every store this time of year, and while I no longer think of them as exotic, I always look forward to adding their orange-lemon flavor to my bakes. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I only have one lone meyer lemon recipe in my 
Well, consider that oversight rectified. Today’s Meyer Lemon Drizzle Cakes celebrate everything that is wonderful about this winter citrus. There’s meyer lemon zest in the batter, the cakes are soaked in a sticky meyer lemon syrup, and the cakes are topped with a thick meyer lemon icing drizzle. Yesssss.
This recipe is based off the 
But before we get to icing, let’s talk syrup! After baking, these cakes are soaked with a meyer lemon simple syrup. To make it, just combine equal volumes of meyer lemon juice and granulated sugar over low heat, stirring just until the sugar dissolves. Easy.
While the cakes are still warm, poke ‘em full of holes. I like to use a thin, flexible knife to keep them inconspicuous, but a skewer will work. Whatever you use, poke it through to the bottom. Then pour over that syrup. You’ll think it’s too much, or that it’ll make your cakes soggy, but it won’t. It’ll just make them extra moist and dense and outrageously delicious. This is the good stuff.
Last but not least, let’s talk about the drizzle. It’s a just a simple icing—two ingredients, one bowl, no mixer—but it’s the crowning glory on these tea cakes. Once the soaked cakes are cool, set them on a cooling rack and pour the icing down the center. The cakes’ slight domes should help the icing to “spread” itself, but you can coax it with the back of a spoon, too. It’ll drip down the sides a bit, but should be thick enough that most of it stays on top. The icing will set quickly, which is a good thing because you’re going to want to dig right in.
Meyer Lemon Drizzle Cake is good on the first day. Very good, even. But if you have the patience, you should wait a day or two to have a slice. The cakes become even more tender and the orange-lemon flavor intensifies over time, making those day-old slices absolutely heavenly.
I, however, have no patience around Meyer Lemon Drizzle Cake.
If you are looking for an apple cake with brown sugar and warming spices, this isn’t the one. (
If, however, you’re looking for a buttery, almost custard-like cake with only a teaspoon of vanilla extract to distract from the flavor of tender fresh apples, you’ve come to the right blog.
Meet the French Apple Cake. It’s easy. It’s elegant. It’s French home-baking at its finest.
This little cake is perfect for the upcoming holidays (or just any ol’ day) because it requires minimal effort and delivers big time. Also, it requires exactly nine ingredients (ten, if you include the confectioner’s sugar) and there’s an 80% chance you have all of them already.
There’s no need to soften any butter either, so you can conceivably have this in the oven in under 20 minutes. You won’t even need to break out your mixer!
This beauty bakes up in about 45 minutes, and since it doesn’t require frosting or filling or anything more than a dusting of confectioner’s sugar, it only needs a 15 minute rest before you can release it from its springform and slice it up.
You read all that correctly. If you crank the oven right now, you can be eating French Apple Cake in 80 minutes.
I’d start moving toward the kitchen, if I were you.
e2 bakes brooklyn 