Blackberry bread cake

Pain sucré aux mûres

Every year we have a different bumper crop when it comes to fruit. The first year that we lived here, we found ourselves being overwhelmed by the huge amount of cherries that came off our trees. The second year we didn’t know what to do with all the plums that we harvested, and this year we have filled our freezer with kg’s of blackberries. By now we have harvested 6kg of these black guys and I’m thinking that we are only halfway now. Incredible really, knowing that they all come from one single bush. A bush that we planted ourselves two years ago.

It’s all well, these kind of harvests, but the problem really is that we don’t know what to do with the amount of fruit that comes off all at once. Sure we can make confiture, but one can only have a certain amount of confiture. We need more ideas, more recipes to try out.

A week ago or so, I saw a recipe from a dutch blogger friend. She made yoghurt bread with sultana’s. Yum! The recipe seemed very straight forward (which I like). I immediately wanted to try it out. I didn’t have sultana’s though, so I decided to try it out with my infinite load of blackberries.

Using blackberries instead of sultana’s required a bit of an adjustment in the recipe I thought. -|-|- this is the moment where I normally mess up and implode the whole cake -|-|- First of all I decided to double up on everything as I had an infinite amount of blackberries. And then I kind of imagined that I needed to add a bit more of the dry material to the mix, as I was using fresh (wet) fruit and the original recipe used dried fruits. So I increased the dry ingredients and the . I also needed to add something sweet to make up for the tartiness of the blackberries. I decided to add honey and coconut blossom sugar, as they are both good and healthy alternatives to regular sugar.

Much to my surprise the bread cake turned out perfect! It was nice and spongy, and lightly sweet, but definitely not too sweet. The tartiness of the blackberries and the lemon was still present, which balanced out the bread cake. I call it a bread cake as it has the consistency of something in between bread and cake. Very nice!

Apparently you can change baking recipes, as long as you think about what you change and in which amounts you change it. Another lesson learned! I will definitely be making more of this bread (and the original recipe) in the future. It’s a perfect bread for a special occasion and can be made with both fresh soft fruit as well as dried fruits. Find out below how I made my blackberry bread cake.

Ingredients:

• 700gr flour (I used farine de blé type 65, but any other type is ok as well)
• 14gr baking powder
• 14gr baking soda
• 7gr salt
• 3 eggs
• 700gr curds/fromage blanc
• 50gr coconut blossom sugar
• 50gr honey
• lemon grind of 1/2 lemon
• 500gr blackberries

What to do:

Take two bowls. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in one bowl. Mix the eggs, fromage blanc, coconut sugar, honey and lemon grind in the other bowl. When that’s done, mix everything together and then add the blackberries to the mix. Place the mix in an oiled baking tray.

Preheat the oven on 180 degrees (C) and bake the bread off on that same temperature for about 50-60 minutes until it’s done. You can check if it’s done by pricking a toothpick in the thickest part of the bread. If the toothpick comes out dry (don’t prick into a berry) the cake is done.

Let it cool down and taste it when it’s cold, because it’s quite sour when it’s still warm. When it cools down, the sourness mellows down. If you still don’t find it sweet enough, you can spread some honey on top or some confiture.

That’s it. Easy isn’t it?

You can freeze part of the cake for later use. Or just make a smaller amount if you don’t want to have some more for later. I just prefer to cook in bigger quantities.