A Blueberry Bundt cake fit for a birthday girl

We all have a flop once in a while. Especially when baking cakes. But is that disaster necessarily the flop it appears to be? What if it has just not finished cooking?

I was convinced last Saturday that my cake had collapsed beyond redemption. Yet, it turned out it wasn’t at all.

So this is a story about not losing courage, not giving up, and persevering until you have the result you were looking for.

I set out to make a surprise birthday cake for a friend on Saturday. We were expected on Sunday afternoon to celebrate her milestone birthday.

I’d bought lots of blueberries. Not the defunct phone, but the perky round berries that are supposedly blue but really are black to anyone who doesn’t have Clark Kent’s super vision.

The problem – if there even was much of a problem, with hindsight – was that I wanted to bake the cake in my 25-litre air fryer oven and had (mis)calculated accordingly.

It’s a big one with a glass door, racks and shelves, much like a large conventional oven on a smaller scale. So this recipe is meant to be cooked in that kind of a machine, or you could do it in a proper big old oven, just like grandma used to.

Whether this will work in a smaller air fryer, I don’t know. If you try it, please let me know how it worked out. What you do need, at the very least, is a machine in which a standard Bundt cake tin will fit with space around it for hot air to circulate.

I borrowed a Bundt tin from my daughter, who is a star baker. Baking is not my strong suit, but now and then I do have a success that I’m happy to share. And this is one of them, even if it did not seem to be at first.

I had made what I thought was an astute calculation. If this cake would bake in a large, normal oven for 50 to 60 minutes at 180°C, it seemed logical to take the temperature down to 160°C or 165°C and cut the baking time to 40 to 50 minutes. So I made the batter, spooned it into the greased and floured cake tin, and put it in the preheated oven set to 160°C for 50 minutes.

Thirty minutes into the baking time, I had a peek, and could see that the batter had risen right to the top of the Bundt tin. Victory and glory lay in wait, surely?

Then I went off for a Saturday nap, knowing that it would turn off automatically, at which point the cake would start to cool in the machine. My slumbers were sweet and redolent of slices of blueberry cake slathered with purple glaze.

I bolted to the machine on waking up, excited to see the perfection that awaited. I lifted the tin out and gawked in horror. The batter was pallid of hue and had sunk in the middle. Not just a little – really sunk, a third of the way into the pan.

And my blueberry cake was beige.

I thought about it for a while then, shrugging, decided I had nothing left to lose. I took a deep breath and switched the machine on again, setting it to 180°C, for 50 minutes.

I watched some silly TV, trying not to think about it. A Latvian lady was making a blueberry tart, as if to torment me. I dozed intermittently. Her bearded husband picked up a bottle of blueberry liqueur and drained it in seconds while a polar bear lazed in his lap. I shook awake. Whazzat noise?

The machine had pinged. With trepidation, I tiptoed over, knowing that I would find a sunken cake that had turned into a deflated brick.

But it had risen again, right to the top of the tin. The crust was golden and beautiful. I inserted a skewer in several places, deeply, and it came out clean.

I put the tin and its contents on a rack to cool (again).

Two hours later I came back, held a plate over the top end of the tin, turned it over and the cake popped out.

I lifted the tin to find this:

The flop had turned into a magnificent success.

What this tells us is that a collapsed cake is not necessarily the end of the story. Often, it will be. I can’t imagine a sponge batter being revived once it’s flopped. But this is a sturdy batter, surprisingly heavy once mixed, to the extent that when you spoon it in, it stands its ground rather than spreading in the tin. I feared, in fact, that it might be too dense and might not bake well at all.

But it did, as we know. Twice.

The recipe I share below has been adapted with common sense, as I don’t truly expect you to start by creating a flop and then fix it. What I should have done was put it in a preheated 180°C oven from the outset, and bake it for 45 to 60 minutes.

For the last 15 minutes I would keep a close eye on it to decide whether to stop cooking at 45, 50, 55 or 60 minutes. This may vary from oven to oven because their size and shape will affect the baking.

If, on checking (and you need to slide it out of the machine so that you can see the entire top of the cake), it is too pale, and/or has sunk in the middle, put it back in for 5 to 10 minutes more. You’ll know it’s done when it has risen to the top of the tin (which is actually the bottom of the cake) and is a lovely golden brown.

Then, insert a clean bamboo or metal skewer and withdraw it. It should be perfectly clean. Insert it at two or three more points in different parts of the cake. If it’s clean every time, your cake is cooked.

Tony’s blueberry Bundt cake

Ingredients

(Makes 1 cake)

385g (2 and ¾ cups) cake flour, sifted

375g (1 and ⅔ cups) castor sugar

80g raw almonds, ground coarsely in a food processor

1 heaped Tbsp baking powder

1 heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp fine salt

Zest of 2 limes

3 jumbo eggs

220g cold butter, cubed

1 cup full cream plain yoghurt

250g fresh blueberries

Extra blueberries for garnish

For the glaze (these quantities are approximate):

The muddled juice of 250g fresh blueberries

125g icing sugar (more or less)

Method

Beg, buy or borrow a Bundt tin.

Grease the inside with butter, then shake flour over it through a fine sieve. Shake the excess flour out of the tin.

Put the raw almonds into a food processor and blitz them. Stop blitzing when some of the bits are still fairly coarse, so there’s a mixture of coarse and fine crumbs. This adds to the texture of the finished cake.

Add all the dry ingredients to a large baking bowl (flour, castor sugar, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, ground almonds, salt, and lime zest).

Give it a thorough stir to distribute everything evenly.

Add the cubed butter to the dry mixture. Using clean hands, work the butter into the flour so that you have a result resembling breadcrumbs, much like when making flaky pastry.

Make a well in the middle of the dry mixture. Whisk the eggs in a small bowl and pour into the well.

Using a large wooden spoon, stir the eggs into the mixture. It will be stiff and may take some effort.

Now add the yoghurt and fold it in until the mixture is as smooth as a mixture this dense will become.

Fold the blueberries into the batter. Because of its density, they will distribute evenly and will hold their place when it is baked.

Spoon the batter into the greased and floured Bundt tin, as evenly as you can.

Bake in a preheated 180°C large air fryer oven, or in a large conventional oven.

If in a large air fryer oven, set it for 45 minutes, then check and continue for 5 minutes at a time if you can see that more time is needed.

If in a large old oven, bake it for 50 to 60 minutes at 180°C, also checking for the last 10 minutes.

Remove to a rack and leave to cool before upending it carefully onto a plate placed above the flat end of the tin. Turn it over and, voilà.

Only ice/glaze the cake once it has cooled completely. I did it the following morning.

Put the fresh blueberries into a bowl and find an implement that you can muddle them with. The handle of a large rolling pin, perhaps. Bash and pummel them until you have got all the juice you can out of them.

Strain this through a fine sieve, rubbing the pulp with a wooden spoon or spatula.

Pour icing sugar into a medium bowl and whisk the juice (which will be quite thick) into it. You want a glaze that is pourable but fairly thick.

Pour this over the cold cake, and let some of it glide down the side and form little pools. That’s part of its appeal. Decorate with whole and halved fresh blueberries. DM

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Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the Year award.

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