Friday Florida Food Fest: DANGER! MEN BAKING

Before you read any farther, let me just say that I can bake girly style, (AKA following the directions) but I am a guy, so sometimes I fail to do this.

Let me also add that I generally do not bake, I cook alot, but I bake about three or four times a year ... her birthday, mother's day, and then a few experimental events like the one in this post. What follows is yesterday's experiment.

Here we go.

Publix had blueberries on sale last week and since my backyard blueberry bushes are done, I bought 3 pints. There was more than enough for cereal use and I didn't want any of them to go to waste, so I decided to make something out of them.

Maybe cake?

Yes, cake.

One box of yellow cake mix seemed kinda' skinny, so I opened two boxes and dumped them in a big bowl. The box said I needed 3 eggs X 2 boxes of mix, so I went to the fridge for 6 eggs.

Oops!

Only 3 jumbo eggs and one tiny banty egg from the backyard hens.

Uh oh, that's about 3.5 eggs and I needed 6.

Hmmmm.

Since I was simultaneously making a simple beef stroganoff for the kids and some KungPao beef for the adults, their was a pint of sourcream sitting on the counter in front of me.

Aha! We'll just substitute a big dollop of sour cream for a couple of eggs.

Problem solved.

As you can see in the first picture, my basic plan was to dump blueberries into the yellow cake mix for a blueberry muffiny kind of cake.

That's good, but not very inspiring or creative.

Hmmmm. How can we tickle this recipe a little?

I tossed a couple handfulls of blueberries into the amazing mini-foodprocessor wacker thingie and whirred them into a mass of purple goo. Meanwhile, a pat of butter (real butter from real cows) went into a small sauce pan to melt. After the butter melted, I added the chopped blueberry goo and let it bubble on low heat for a while.

Still feeling the urge to tinker, I went to the fridge and pulled out the almost empty bottle of cheap blackberry merlot.

As the buttery blueberry goo gently bubbled, I added a couple of splashes of merlot and turned up the heat just a little to reduce the berry sauce.

I whisked it while it bubbled to prevent scorching.

As it thickened, I whisked in powdered sugar ... how much? Well, I think I reached into the powdered sugar container 3 or 4 times, grabbing a multifinger pinch each time. I didn't want the sauce to be too sweet, yellow cake mix is pretty sweet by itself.

Meanwhile, back in the bowl of batter, I dumped in whole blueberries ... 2 handfulls, and stirred them in.

I sprayed a Wilton pan with some generic cooking spray and dumped in the cake mix avec whole blueberries.

Once the batter was in the pan, I poured the blueberry sauce on top of the batter and then used a chopstick (remember, I was also cooking Chinese) to swirl it throughout the batter.

When it was sufficiently paisleyprint swirly, I put the whole thing into a 300 degree oven.

Our good friend Jeannie who is a cake baking master says, " Use a good quality cake pan and forget what the recipe calls for, just set the oven on 300 degrees and cook it until it's done."
This is some of the best cooking advice I've ever gotten.

No more burned outsides.

"Anticipation"

Here's the finished project after about an hour at 300 degrees. It's still cooling off, but already has attracted a cake tester complete with glass of milk (real milk from real cows).

"Satisfaction"

So far, everyone who tasted it has really liked it. In fact, this morning, there is only about half a cake out there in the kitchen.

I had some for breakfast, with coffee, and it was pretty good.

For a guy cake.