Ultimate Blueberry Cake with Lemon Syrup

Fresh blueberries are in season y’all!

Go pick some fresh blueberries with your little ones and make some killer dessert with them! I take my kids pick blueberries every year, since my oldest was one and a half years old. Let me tell ya, every year, we pick 30-40 lbs of fresh blueberries, come home, sort out the biggest and juiciest and freeze them in sandwich or quart size Ziploc bags and freeze. These berries last a whole year of desserts, smoothies or just as a simple super healthy frozen treat!

For now, I will focus on the Ultimate Blueberry cake with Lemon Syrup. It’s a huge hit every time it’s made.

Wet Ingredients:

3 large eggs
1/2 cup canola oil 1 tsp vanilla extract (please buy a bottle of the real stuff, makes a huge difference in your dessert)
1 cup Greek yogurt

1/2 cup sugar (with 1 additional TBSP sugar for syrup)

Dry Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour (and additional 1 TBSP flour if you are using frozen berries)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Star Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of fresh or frozen blueberries
2 large lemons

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 350 deg F.

Grease, flour and parchment paper your loaf pan. I used a 9x5x3 loaf pan, even though it’s non-stick, I still did this step. I had a loaf stuck in my pan before, so, don’t skip this step!

In a medium bowl, whisk all dry ingredients together.

Add all wet ingredients into a larger bowl. Zest your lemons at this time, zest goes into wet ingredients bowl. Save your lemons, you will need the juice later.

Whisk wet ingredients together with the same whisk (I really don’t like introducing more tools to wash, unless I absolutely have to.) The lemon zest and vanilla extract smells so good at this point, you know you will have an amazing cake in the end already!

Slowly add all dry ingredient mixture into wet mixture, that’s why you want to mix the wet ingredients in a larger bowl. You have no idea how many times I used the wrong size bowl, and ended up with a mess when I bake. Ha, lessons learned, pay attention before dirty up a dish, figure out which bowl will end up having all the ingredients together in the end.

The mixture will be a sticky mess, but kinda cool looking.

In a smaller bowl, mix your blueberries and that 1 additional TBSP of flour, this prevents the berries to bleed too much into the batter, and helps them stay afloat during the baking process and don’t sink to the bottom.

Gently fold berries into the batter. I recommend using a rubber spatula for this, scrap the sides of the bowl as you go, try not to poke the berries.

Pour the batter with berries into your prepared loaf pan, and smooth it out a tiny bit.

Into the oven it goes. Now it’s the time to wash all the dirty dishes and tools and walk away.

Come back in about 50 minutes and check on your cake. If a clean tooth pick comes out clean from your cake, leave it in the loaf pan to cool at least 10 minutes. If the toothpick doesn’t come out clean, stick the cake back into the oven and bake for 10 minutes more.

While the cake is cooling in the loaf pan, juice your naked lemons into a small pot, add 1 TBSP sugar and stir on medium heat until sugar is dissolved.

Transfer cake onto a plate, poke some more holes on the cake with the tooth pick, this will help the cake to absolve the lovely lemony flavor of the syrup. You guessed it, slowly pour syrup on the cake while cake is still warm.

Slice up and enjoy!