Food You Can Eat: Blueberry Almond Loaf Cake

Ha! This is not another Bundt cake recipe. I adapted this from the Ottolenghi Simple cookbook. It has a sweet/tart taste, which I prefer to a very sweet cake.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and grease your loaf pan. Trim a sheet of parchment paper to cover the bottom of the pan, with enough paper over-hanging the sides to use as handles when you remove the cake from the pan. Grease the bottom only of the parchment paper.

Mix 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter and 1 cup sugar, the zest of 2 lemons, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice until creamy, about 4 minutes. Add in 3 large beaten eggs, one at a time.

Mix in 2/3 cups flour, 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons almond meal, ½ teaspoon baking powder, and 1/8 teaspoon salt. (I am strangely annoyed by all the X cups plus X tablespoon measurements in this recipe.)  

Add in 5 ounces or so of fresh blueberries, and spoon evenly into the loaf pan. Now we get fussy…Bake for 15 minutes and remove from the oven. Sprinkle 2+ ounces of fresh blueberries on the cake and put back in the oven for another 15 minutes. Pull the cake out, cover it with foil, and pop it back in the oven for another 25-30 minutes, until a skewer comes out cleanly.

Remove and cool for 10 minutes, the remove the cake from the pan and put it on a wire rack until totally cool.

Meanwhile, as the cake cools, make an icing by mixing 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons cups of confectioners’ sugar with 2 tablespoons lemon juice. Pour/spoon the icing over the cooled loaf cake, slice, and enjoy!

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About Elliecoo 557 Articles
Four dogs, one partner. The dogs win.

6 Comments

  1. Perfection itself. I wonder if there’s a way you could make this in a Bundt pan and flambé it? Or maybe make a sugar coating and brûlée.

    I’m just joking (not about the perfection part.)

    Oddly enough both my parents were heavy smokers and they didn’t believe in lighters, so there were always packs of matches lying about. Neither I nor any of my siblings were ever tempted to play with them so I don’t know where my “could this possibly be flambéd?” pyromania comes from. It might be an offshoot of my “there must be a way to add liquor to this. Maybe in a glaze…”

  2. @Elliecoo I’ve never used almond meal. Does it give this cake a lot of almond flavor? This cake sounds wonderful, almond, lemon, and blueberries go so well together. And perfect for a holiday brunch.

  3. @Hannibal, according to the website kitchn:

    Both are made from ground almonds, though almond flour and almond meal have two subtle differences that set them apart. Almond flour is typically made from blanched almonds which have had the skins removed, and is ground more finely than almond meal, which typically still contains the skins and has a more coarse grind.

    I pretty much them interchangeably, although @Butcherbakertoiletrymaker may call foul on that…

  4. Yum yum. With the powdered sugar icing, it reminds me of a stollen loaf, but with delicious, fresh blueberries rather than sultanas and candied fruit (blech). 

  5. Whenever I see recipes like “2/3 cup plus 2 tbsp of ____” I just assume it’s adapted for our stupid imperial measuring system and would be something like “100 g ___” in other places. 

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