Blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla

blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla

I added a new item to the full menu this weekend:  blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla.  I love blueberries in muffins, and these are a sort of hybrid of muffin and cupcake.  I've been tinkering with this for a long time, working to get it just right.  I wanted a certain texture and a very specific balance of flavors, and I wanted them to be visually appealing but also relaxed and homestyle in appearance.  

Over the last few months, I have used a lot of pints of fresh blueberries in order to develop these into exactly what I wanted.  How many?  Let's just say it was dozens.  I experimented with both fresh and wild blueberries.  I tinkered with mixing by hand and also mixing by machine at various speeds.  I tested out different sizes and different cooking temperatures.  You get the idea.....

What was really nice in all this was that even the versions that weren't quite was I was looking for were very yummy.  So I got to sample lots and lots of these over the last while.  It was a terrible job ... NOT!  That's one of the nice things about making food, i.e., even when something doesn't go just right, it still might be pretty good to eat. 

That being said, I was glad when I nailed down the version with the exact mixing process, the specific ingredient ratios, and the cooking time and temperature.  Why?  Because I am ready to devote more time to some other foods that have been pushed aside while I obsessed over these like Ahab over the whale.  When I got the final version, I made three batches on three consecutive days. That allowed me to see that the same process worked every time, and it allowed me to sample the final version under different scenarios:  1, when I was very hungry; 2, when I wasn't hungry at all; and 3, well, no, I guess there were only two, but the third day allowed me to do one final check.

So keep an eye out and you'll see them on a weekly menu coming up soon.  And now on to a few other things including a new cookie, a spiced flatbread, a cake with lemon, and many other things.