Brown Butter Blueberry Buckle | Easy Blueberry Coffee Cake

What Is Blueberry Buckle?

Blueberry buckle is a blueberry-filled coffee cake with a fairly thick streusel topping. When it bakes up, the streusel sort of slumps in and some of the fruit bubbles up and the top generally has a buckled appearance.

Like other old fashioned fruit desserts named for the sound they make while cooking (mixed cherry berry grunt, for example) or for how they look when they come out of the oven (cherry blueberry slump, plum cobbler), a buckle is a descriptive name.

To that basic definition, I’ll add that a buckle is generally made with a thick batter–almost a dough–and it bakes up nice and moist and wonderful.

Think of it sort of like a biscuit-type cobbler, except instead of putting the dough on top of the fruit, the fruit is mixed into the dough, topped with streusel, and then baked.h

How to Make Brown Butter

First, I will say that you don’t have to use brown butter in this cake. You can just use regular old melted butter, and your cake with be very tasty.

But taking the extra few minutes to make brown butter and let it cool down a bit brings a lovely mellow nuttiness and a bit more complexity to the batter that I think is worth the extra effort.

Here’s how to make it–and it’s not hard. Honest!

The video on this post also shows how to brown butter in case you’d rather watch video than try to follow still photographs.

1. Weigh out the butter and cut it into pieces for even melting.
2. Cook over medium to medium-high heat, watching it carefully. No need to stir, but you can swirl the pan.
3. First, the butter will sputter as the water cooks out, (middle left image).
4. After the milk solids fall to the bottom of your pan, it will get very foamy. Swirl the pan so you can see the color of the browned bits on the bottom.
5. Stop when the milk solids are a deep brown but not burnt and immediately pour into a heat-safe container to cool down a bit.

You can strain out the little browned bits if you want, but I like to leave them in to add to the nuttiness.

Now that you have your browned butter, you can proceed with the recipe. Or you might decide to make browned butter toffee chocolate chip cookies. I’m not judging.

How to Make the Blueberry Buckle Batter

I admit I didn’t need to use all those words in a row, but I do love me some alliteration!

Anyway, the batter is easy to make using The Muffin Method.

In a nutshell, here’s how it goes:

1. Whisk together all dry ingredients.
2. Whisk together all wet ingredients.
3. Pour wet into dry and mix until barely combined.

This is the same method used to make Ritz Carlton Blueberry Muffins and Pancakes for One among many other muffin and quick bread possibilities.

1. Scale out your wet ingredients: yogurt, buttermilk, lemon extract, and egg.
2. Whisk them together until well combined and smooth.
3. Whisk in the cooled-down-but-still-warm browned butter (you can leave the bits in or strain them out)
4. Whisk together the dry ingredients: flour, brown sugar, baking powder and baking soda, cinnamon, and salt
5. Pour the wet into the dry.
6. Add the fresh or still-frozen blueberries.
7. Fold together just until there is no loose flour in the bottom of the bowl.
8. Put the thick batter/sticky dough into your springform pan. Prepare the pan by spraying it with pan spray and putting a round of parchment in the bottom.
9. With a spatula, press the dough evenly into the pan.

If you have made a sandy streusel with some chunks of butter remaining, scatter it all over the top of the batter, pressing down lightly.

If you have made a dough-like streusel by working the butter in completely like I did, break off small pieces and scatter them all over the buckle batter.

What’s the Difference Between Those Two Kinds of Streusel?

A sandy streusel will bake up with looser, smaller crisp bits while a dough-like streusel will be more crunchy.

There is no wrong way to do it–it just depends on what texture you want your crumb topping to be.

Bake that guy off until he’s deep golden brown and the internal temperature is about 200F. I use an instant read thermometer for this, and I recommend you get one too because it’s the least stressful way I know to tell if anything and everything from cakes to steaks are done.

What If I Don’t Have Blueberries?

No problem. You can make a buckle with almost any kind of juicy summer fruit. I think a cherry buckle would be splendid! I would probably substitute some nutmeg or mace for the cinnamon, but it’d still be great if you use cinnamon.

Other buckle-worthy fruits:

• Strawberries (I’d quarter them)
• Raspberries–as is
• Blackberries–as is, unless you have some huge ones. Cut those in half.
• Mango–diced
• Peaches–diced
• Plums–diced

You may also want to try my peach breakfast cake. Based loosely on this recipe, it is packed with peaches in a lemon, vanilla, and almond-scented part-cornmeal batter. So good!

Questions

And there you have it, friends. Enjoy the blueberry buckle.

Take care, and have a lovely day.

Disclaimer: These posts and recipes are part of the week-long event, #SummerDessertWeek but all opinions are 100% mine! We would like to Thank our amazing sponsors: Dixie Crystals, Adam’s Extract, Wilton, Sweets and Treats Shop and Anolon! These wonderful sponsors provided the prize packs for our giveaways (now closed) and also sent samples and products to the #SummerDessertWeek bloggers to use in their recipes.