Tastes like purple?

This has definitely been a weird baking week.  

It all started off with my baking goal of the week: use up as many frozen blueberries as possible. I had a fairly large bag of them sitting in my freezer and I realized blueberry and banana smoothies just lack that certain je ne sais quoi that other berries provide in a smoothie So rather than be economical, and just mix blueberries with other berries, I decided to just use them up! So I typed "blueberry" and "dessert" into the allrecipes.com search bar and found myself with an abundance of options! Crumbles, pies, muffins, sauces - the possibilities were endless. Then one in particular caught my eye - mostly because I had only known this item previously as an item which helped hold up pants.

Blueberry Buckle. Blueberries I knew, but I had never heard of anything edible called a buckle. Curious, I read the recipe and it didn't seem too crazy. No exotic ingredients, or crazy cooking methods (hey, with a name like buckle, who knew!) - so I decided to try it! I knew nothing about a buckle before, but hopefully after the experience I would at least gain some insight.

I adapted the recipe slightly based on the ingredients I had. Unbeknownst to me, we had very little granulated sugar so I had to cut back and substitute brown in at some points. Warning: this recipe makes a lot of buckle. I filled a 9x13 inch pan (they suggest a 9 inch square pan) and cut it huge pieces so I wouldn't have leftovers lying around. Anyways, here it is!

Blueberry Buckle
Adapted from Allrecipes.com Makes about 24 normal sized squares (or 15 huge ones if you are like me!)

1/4 cup butter, softened

2/3 cup sugar (was originally 3/4 cup)
1 egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsps baking powder
1/2 cup milk
2 cups frozen blueberries (thawed and drained)

TOPPING:

2/3 cup brown sugar (originally white sugar)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/3 cup cold butter

Directions

1. In a small mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in the egg. Combine the flour, and baking powder; add to creamed mixture alternately with milk. Fold in the blueberries. Scoop into greased 9x13in. baking pan.
2. For topping, combine the sugar, flour and cinnamon in a bowl; cut in butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over blueberry mixture. Bake at 375 degrees F for 40-45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

As I mentioned, I only made this recipe because I needed to use up frozen berries. My experience in the past is if you stick frozen berries in your baked goods, they end up little pockets of moisture after they bake, and that isn't always a good thing. So I decided to defrost the berries first and get rid of some of the extra moisture. I knew they would turn the batter a little purple, but I didn't think it would be too bad. Boy was I wrong!

I have never seen something so purple in my life! And as I folded in the berries it just got more and more purple. A feeling of dread came over me as I pictured my co-workers eating purple cake! I would have taken a picture of the batter, but I was too ashamed!

I was really starting to regret my decision of defrosting the berries and was going to throw it out, but I didn't want to waste all those ingredients. So I made the topping and sprinkled it over the batter. Luckily there was enough topping to completely cover the purple, so at least from above it looked normal.

Now, as you can see from the image of the finished product, the cake isn't purple. I don't know what happened, but somehow the purple disappeared. I thought I had mixed the berries well into the dough (they are in the middle of the cake after all, not only on the top or bottom) - but somehow the purple didn't completely take over! That was a huge relief! And after trying the finished product, I thought it was a good cake. Not too sweet (as some of the reviewers on allrecipes stated), but still moist and with a nice crunch on top. It would be perfect with a cup of coffee or tea while reading a book.

So what I thought was going to be an epic purple failure (much like a certain purple dinosaur from my childhood), turned out pretty well! I was surprised. And after the whole experience I have learned this: buckle is like coffee cake with a crumble topping! Apparently it falls under the cobbler family of desserts, but I think my description is apt enough!