Saturday, August 4, 2012

Blueberry Cardamom Cake with Melty Lemon Icing



This deliciously moist cake that I baked for Amanda's birthday has a special place in my heart because it celebrates three new loves that entered my life this summer.

1. Amanda: The driving force behind my newfound love for cooking and living well. I'm so happy I ended up discovering my fire sign soul-sister this summer and am so grateful for all the joy and wisdom Amanda brought to Pine Street Apartments. A truly beautiful human being. Inside and out.

2. Cardamom: A few nights ago we were having a game night and playing Taboo. Amanda's clue for her word was, "We cook with this a lot!" to which Rob replied, "CARDAMOM!" The answer was actually onions, but it wasn't completely foolish for Robert to guess cardamom (if you ignore the fact that the Taboo manufacturers would definitely not include a cardamom card in their family game) because we LOVE cardamom. It is the spice of our friendship.

3. Blueberries: I never disliked blueberries. In fact, I have always thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated every fruit. Blueberries, however, were always one of my least favorite fruits. When I could find a good blueberry, which seemed to be a rare occurrence, I would enjoy it, but these good blueberries seemed to be few and far between. Fortunately, summertime in Maine showed me the light. Freshly-picked Maine blueberries are unbelievable. There's no such thing as eating just a few because they are SO delicious. And the best thing is they're one of the healthiest fruits! Low sugar content and high in antioxidants. Arguably one of my new favorite fruits.

The recipe for the cake was borrowed from this blog post by Joy the Baker (one of mine and Amanda's favorite food bloggers) but I opted for blueberries instead of strawberries and skipped the upside-down part.



I absolutely love cakes made with sour cream. It makes them so moist not too sweet. Mmm.

For the icing:

Combine:

1 stick butter (room temperature)
3 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk--we only had skim milk (yuck) so replaced it with half and half
The juice of 1.5 (or however many suits your fancy) lemons

Mix with an electric mixer! This icing was VERY drippy, which ended up working out well because with all the blueberries on top of the cake we ended up having to haphazardly stick candles in the icing, but if you want something thicker experiment with adding more sugar

Ice the cake, top with blueberries, and ENJOY!!!

Cake, champagne, and sunflowers. Does life get any better?

-Iris

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