August will always and forever be the month when we wash blue stains off our clothes. It’s still early in the month and we have already spent many days on our knees, picking blueberries in the Swedish forests. At the moment, the forests are literally covered with gorgeous blue gems, so sitting down inevitably means staining your clothes. We add blueberries to every breakfast dish, add them to our lunch salads and in our desserts.
We seem to get hooked on new blueberry recipes every year. Last year this wonderful crumble was going on repeat and a few years earlier, this blueberry smoothie. This year we have been making batch after batch of this Sunken Blueberry & Yogurt Cake. It is similar to some of our other almond flour cakes but we have adjusted the recipe to make it easier to bake without burning. It is light and moist, has a balanced sweetness and a fresh accent from yogurt and lemon zest. The cake is gluten free too (choose certified gluten free oats if intolerant). The beaten egg whites give this cake a very light and airy feeling so I imagine that it’s hard to create a vegan version of it. For vegans, I instead recommend making a cake version of our blueberry turmeric muffins with chia seeds. They are one of our favourite vegan treats and we imagine that they would be excellent as a cake. Just give it a little extra baking time.
The randomly scattered blueberries and the golden crust on this cake makes it beautiful as it is, served straight up, perhaps with just a dollop of yogurt on the side. But after a visit at the amazing rooftop restaurant Stedsans on Østergro in Copenhagen, we got hooked on a new way to serve cake. They made a chocolate cake that they smashed up/shattered into randomly sized pieces that they mixed with dollops of whipped cream, yogurt and berries. It’s a really friendly way to serve a cake as all pieces have different sizes and different amount of topping and it makes picking pieces to a bit of a lottery. Swedes are also very rigid when it comes to fairness and size of cake pieces so this is perfectly provoking. And most importantly, we also think it looks gorgeously decadent and chaotic served like this. Elsa however wants us to add that she think it looks ugly like this and can’t understand why we want to destroy a perfectly pretty cake!
What do you think? Do you feel like shattering your next cake into a decadent dessert chaos or do you prefer it nice, tidy and pretty, like Elsa does?
Shattered Blueberry & Yogurt Cake
Serves 8-10
You can of course replace the blueberries with other berries in season.
1 cup / 250 ml / 90 g rolled oats (choose cert. gluten free if intolerant)
1 cup / 250 ml / 100 g almond flour/meal
½ cup / 125 ml / 80 g rice flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground vanilla
1/2 tsp sea salt
3.5 oz / 100 g butter, room tempered
1/2 cup / 125 ml maple syrup
or honey
1 organic lemon, zest
3 eggs, separated
1 cup / 250 ml full-fat plain yogurt (we use Greek or Turkish yogurt)
2 cups / 1/2 liter / 200 g blueberries
To serve
2 cups whipped cream
1 cup full-fat plain yogurt
2 cups mixed summer berries
Heat the oven to 350°F / 180°C. Place the oats in a food processor and mix them into flour. Pour into a large mixing bowl and mix together with almond flour, rice flour, baking powder, vanilla and sea salt. Place butter, maple syrup and lemon zest in the food processor and mix until creamy. Add egg yolks and yogurt and continue to beat for another minute. Pour the liquid into the mixing bowl with flour and fold everything together.
Beat egg whites in a separate bowl with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Slowly fold the egg whites and half of the blueberries into the cake mixture.
Put a baking sheet inside an 8 inch / 22 cm spring form cake pan and pour the batter into it. Sprinkle the remaining blueberries on top. Bake for about 50-60 minutes, or until dark and golden on the top and baked all way through. Remove from oven and let cool for a while before removing the sides.
To create the shattered look: Wait until the cake cools completely then place the cake on a large serving platter. Carefully break the cake into variously sized pieces. Keep the same round shape, but only bigger. Twist and turn the broken cake pieces a bit and arrange with random dollops of whipped cream, yogurt and mixed berries on top and in between them. Scatter any remaining berries on top and serve immediately.
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