What a dramatic title. It’s really just experiment time! I never really enjoyed science experiments at school but I do enjoy a cake experiment – not sure if that’s because I get to eat the final product? #cakescience
Before we start please can we just take some time to appreciate the fact I made this picture:
A highlight of this blog post I’m sure.
Anyway this week we’re making a blueberry crumble cake from a book called Grandma’s Best Recipes.
I got this book as a gift a little while ago and I’ve only used the chocolate chip cookie recipe. I’m not sure why I haven’t made more as everything in it looks lovely. It has a lot of recipes for cakes and puddings but also for things like chicken pie, beef stew and fisherman’s pie… I think it all appeals to me because this is the kind of food I’ve grown up on. Anyway, I digress.
I decided it was high time to get this off the shelf and have a proper look through it – I’ve actually marked quite a few other things to try in future but I thought I’d kick things off with this.
I do have a very successful apple and blueberry cake recipe already so I was interested to see how this compared to that. Fun fact; I started eating blueberries when one of my friends told me that if she ever has bad skin she eats a punnet of blueberries a day until it’s cleared up. She swore it was the blueberries that helped her skin clear; I don’t think they really help mine because I don’t eat them in that quantity, and also I don’t think she was eating them in a cake, but never mind.
I’ve never used soured cream in a cake before, and that’s a key component of this one. Extensive Googling reveals that its purpose is to make the cake more dense. I mean I don’t want to give too much away but if that’s what it’s supposed to do, it did a great job here.
I had high hopes for this cake and I was hoping the finished product would be delicious because let me tell you, raw cake batter with soured cream in it is not. And yes I always try a bit of the raw cake batter – you do too, don’t lie.
It took rather longer to bake than it should have but I think that’s largely because by accident I didn’t quite put the oven on high enough. To be honest I’m still not sure if it was actually cooked or if it’s just a very wet mixture – I think it’s the latter and I would attribute that to the soured cream.
The texture was heavy and dense – see previous point about the purpose of soured cream. This cake also has almond essence in the cake batter, and chopped up almonds in the crunchy topping but I actually don’t think it was that flavoursome. I didn’t get the almond flavour at all, even in the topping.
I don’t know if I was that keen on the final product. I think if you have this with custard as a pudding on a cold evening then you’re on to a winner but is it something I’ll make again? No, I don’t think so 🙁
Having said that, while researching the purpose of soured cream I fell down a rabbit hole of articles about soured cream vs buttermilk; I have used buttermilk in cakes on more than one occasion and I have never found those cakes to be particularly heavy, in fact they were all super tasty. So in true Carrie Bradshaw style, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if I made it again but replaced the soured cream with buttermilk? So I did.
My crumble topping was completely different the second time and I’m not really sure why but it looked so good I took a picture before it went into the oven:
Look at that crumble.
I can also report that raw cake batter with buttermilk in isn’t any nicer than raw cake batter with soured cream in.
In terms of the actual cake, as you can see from the picture below the buttermilk version seems to have risen more. Even though it did sink as it was cooling, it still looks fuller than the soured cream slice.
That surprises me because the mixture actually seemed thicker when I made it with buttermilk but buttermilk is thinner than soured cream so I just assumed that the cake would be more liquidy. So even though it seemed thicker I can only assume that it’s risen more because the liquid in it was lighter?
The flavour is also better as I added the half a teaspoon of mixed spice that I was supposed to add to the recipe the first time round as well – whoops. Still couldn’t really get the almond flavour though.
The cake is definitely not as dense with buttermilk in it; I mean I wouldn’t describe it as light and fluffy but I much prefer this texture. You could eat this with a coffee and you wouldn’t need to pour custard on it to make it better. I don’t think it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever made and it’s probably not going to become one of those recipes that becomes a staple, but I did eat two slices of the buttermilk version as opposed to half a slice of the soured cream version.
I think that tells you who the winner is; ding ding ding, on this occasion it’s buttermilk.
