Maybe I pulsed the butter, flour and sugar too long in theįood processor, causing them to break down? No, they would clump, not liquefy, Dorie said. The consistency was off the top of the cake was more of a paste than crumbly. I’ll give you a pan.”Īnd then the issue of the crumbs came up. “Would you consider redoing it with the right-size pan?” she continued. “Recipes need to be made in the right-size pan,” she said. So there we were, on the phone, talking pans. “We need to have a pan talk,” she replied. I put all of this in a cheerful “oh, well!” kind of e-mail to Dorie. I felt sort of bad taking its picture, as though I were capturing it at its most awkward my cake wasĪ teenage boy posing for his bar mitzvah photo.īut it was delicious, despite its ugliness. I had a cake that was eight inches round with a bulging muffin top and a thick, pasty layer of crumb topping. The recipe called for an eight-inch-square pan. This is funny in retrospect because, as it happened, I didn’t have the right-size pan for the blueberry cake recipe either.

I chose the blueberry over a sour creamīundt cake because berries are in season, and, more pressingly, because I didn’t have a bundt pan.

We were on the phone, discussing the blueberry crumb cake I had made - one of two basic butter cake recipes she had offered up as possibilities for my third baking lesson. “I am disturbed by your blueberry cake,” Dorie said. Techniques and tips discussed: the importance of pan size the trials and tribulations of butter troubleshooting crumb topping. LESSON 3: Blueberry Crumb Cake (From “ Baking: From My Home to Yours”) Emily Weinstein is learning to bake with the food writer and cookbook author Dorie Greenspan.

Millie peartree blueberry crumb cake