Monday, July 25, 2005

Blueberry Buckle

"Are you coming over to pick berries tomorrow?" asked my mother-in-law.

"I guess I am," I replied.

"Good, then I don't have to pick them," she said.

My mother-in-law is winding down her reign as the garden queen. She's just got a few flower beds and a vegetable plot bigger than any we've ever had in our life. And she's got the berries: a big thicket of raspberries and a tangle of high-bush blueberries in a chicken wire cage to keep the birds away. More berries than anyone could eat, let alone two people, no matter how many berry desserts they serve up at dinner parties.

So the girls and I went over yesterday afternoon and in 15 minutes had filled a container of raspberries and a bigger container of blueberries. E ate all the raspberries for snack (M snagged a few, but mainly it was E who loudly proclaimed as she ate, "I like raspberries!"). We made a buckle with the blueberries.

When I was a kid, we rented a house on a lake every summer. The only cookbook there was an ancient Betty Crocker whose blueberry buckle recipe became our summer staple. Of course we never thought to copy it down, so there have been lots of semi-successful buckle efforts over the years since we stopped going to that house. Yesterday I googled once again, and there were literally hundreds of buckle recipes, some claiming to be Betty Crocker but still differing from each other (though only slightly--the main differences are whether there is 1/2 or 3/4 cup milk and 2 or 2/12 teaspoons baking powder). I copied down the one that looked best, we made it, and it was perfect: soft blueberry-studded cake, crackly sugary topping, rose beautifully. I highly recommend it.

Blueberry Buckle
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
1 egg
2 cups flour
3/4 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup milk
2 cups blueberries

Crumb Topping
1/2 cup sugar (I used half brown, half white)
1/3 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup soft butter

Preheat oven to 375. Butter and flour an 8" square pan. Cream sugar, butter, and egg. Mix flour, salt and baking powder. Add to butter mixture alternating with milk and blend thoroughly. Fold in blueberries. Pour into pan.

Mix topping ingredients with your fingers till it is the consistency of small crumbs. Spread topping on batter.

Bake 45-50 minutes (ours was done at 45).

3 comments:

Kelly said...

I'll be ganking the recipe, my BIL has 50 blueberry bushes on his property near us and I'll be heading over there later in the week to pick. Last year I filled my freezer! So good.

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for posting this recipe. I'll be making it for an old friend who used to make it for me when I was a little girl.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much! I went organic blueberry picking this weekend and my aunt's BB Buckle came to mind. I didn't have the recipe, just the vague memory of it being a Betty Crocker creation. Thanks for posting and sharing the treat.