Berried & Bundted Bliss

Living in Arizona in the summer time, I do just about anything to avoid turning my oven on.  However, this cake is worth a little extra heat in the house -- after all, if it's already 120*, what're a few more degrees?  This cake is an easy, yummy crowd-pleaser from my good old friend, Smitten Kitchen (AKA the delightful Deb Perelman, whom Cait and I had the privilege of meeting last year).  If you don't know her already, you will become fast friends after making this cake, and I encourage you to check out her blog for just about everything.

Cake

2 1/2 cups (355 grams) plus 2 tablespoons (20 grams) all-purpose flour2 teaspoons (10 grams) baking powder

1 teaspoon fine sea salt or table salt1 cup (8 ounces or 225 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 3/4 cups (340 grams) granulated sugarZest of 1 lemon

3 large eggs, at room temperature1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup (175 ml) buttermilk3 cups (350 to 450 grams) mixed berries

Glaze

2 cups (240 grams) powdered or confections’ sugarJuice of 1 lemon

1 tablespoon (15 grams) unsalted butter, very, very soft

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Generously grease a 10-cup Bundt pan, either with butter or a nonstick spray.* Set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk or sift 2 1/2 cups flour (leaving 2 tablespoons back), baking powder and salt together and set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer or large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, sugar and lemon zest until light and impossibly fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Then, with the mixer on a low speed, add your eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each addition. Beat in vanilla, briefly. Add 1/3 flour mixture to batter, beating until just combined, followed by half the buttermilk, another 1/3 of the flour mixture, the remaining buttermilk and remaining flour mixture. Scrape down from time to time and don’t mix any more than you need to. In the bowl where you’d mixed your dry ingredients, toss the berries with the remaining 2 tablespoons of flour. With a silicon spatula, gently fold the berries into the cake batter. The batter will be very thick and this will seem impossible without squishing the berries a little, but just do your best and remember that squished berries do indeed make for a pretty batter.

Spread cake batter — you might find it easier to plop it in the pan in large spoonfuls, because it’s so thick — in the prepared baking pan and spread the top smooth. Bake for 55 to 60 minutes, rotating the cake 180 degrees after 30 (to make sure it browns evenly). The cake is done as soon as a tester comes out clean of batter. At 10 minutes before my baking time was up, a tester was totally wet with batter and I wascertain it would never be done in the estimated time. 7 minutes later, the same tester was clean as a whistle, so fret not.

Set cake pan on a wire rack to cool for 30 minutes, before inverting the cake onto a serving platter to cool the rest of the way. Cool completely. Once cool, whisk together the powdered sugar, lemon juice and butter until smooth and very, very thick. (If you’d like it thinner, add more juice, but I like the thick drippiness of it, seen above.) Spread carefully over top of cake, letting it trickle down the sides when and where it wishes. Serve at once or keep it covered at room temperature for 3 to 4 days.