On Sunday night I looked at my berry supply and realized that I had enough blueberries for one last dessert. I browsed through epicurious.com and decided to try the Lemon Cornmeal Cake with Lemon Glaze and Crushed-Blueberry Sauce. The main appeal of the recipe was its simplicity. Stir together some flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt. Whisk together some buttermilk, lemon zest, eggs, and vanilla. Fold the wet ingredients -- along with some melted and cooled butter -- into the dry ones. Bake. Top with a glaze of powdered sugar mixed with lemon juice. That's essentially the entire cake recipe.The glaze component was a little frustrating. The instructions tell you to mix to the glaze to a paste-like consistency, and to spread it on top of the cake immediately after the cake comes out of the oven and is unmolded. I multiplied the recipe and made two cakes. For the first cake, pictured above, I left the glaze very thick and paste-like, and I had some difficulty getting it to spread over the entire cake. I was eventually able to get the job done, and the thick layer of glaze quickly set firm, opaque, and clearly visible on the finished cake. I thought it looked quite nice. When the second cake was ready for glazing, I figured that I would avoid the struggle I had endured frosting the first cake by thinning out the glaze a bit with some more lemon juice. I quickly regretted that decision, because although the thinned glaze was much easier to spread, it also set semi-translucent and the finished cake wasn't nearly as attractive.
I topped the cake with Crushed-Blueberry Sauce, which is just blueberries, brown sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest cooked together, with more blueberries added in at the end. My blueberry sauce was thick and syrupy, and it became even thicker after I refrigerated it overnight. I thought that the sauce was very sweet with a flat, one-dimensional flavor. It reminded me a lot of the blueberry syrup you might find at your local pancake house. That said, I do think it was a good addition to the cake, which needed a little something to brighten it up a bit.The cake itself was very moist -- although granular -- and strongly lemon-flavored. I found the gritty texture of the cornmeal to be off-putting, because I felt compelled to explain to everyone eating the cake that the texture was just cornmeal, and not sweepings from my kitchen floor. But I received some nice compliments on the cake, and I definitely appreciate how lovely the lemony-yellow cake looked with its dark and glistening sauce accompaniment.
I used up the very last of my blueberry supply from Butler's making the sauce for this cake. While this cake wasn't my favorite part of the Fruit Fest (that honor has to go to the Brown Butter Almond Torte with Sour Cherry Sauce), I feel pretty good ending on this note. And who knows, there are still a few weeks left in blueberry-picking season, so I might have a chance to go back to the orchard and replenish my supply!
Recipe: Lemon Cornmeal Cake with Lemon Glaze and Crushed-Blueberry Sauce from epicurious.com.
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