The recipe came from a book (Rustic Fruit Desserts) that my mom saw advertised at a New Seasons store near my house. She asked me to get a copy for her and when I went to pick it up, I couldn't help but thumb through its heavenly pages, drooling. When I saw the recipe for the lemon blueberry buckle, I knew I had to try it. It was broken down into 3 separate sections: a recipe for making the crumble topping, a recipe for the cake itself, and a recipe for making the glaze . . . this last only required 2 ingredients, but it said that the finished product needed to pour like a syrup and that made me nervous. It sounded temperamental, this glaze.
The next time Michael and I went to the grocery store, I picked up the few ingredients I needed: a couple of lemons, some nutmeg, buttermilk and more sugar. I was ready to make the buckle; the problem was that we were in the middle of a heat wave and (being as the only air conditioning in our house is in our bedroom) there was no way I wanted to turn my oven to the required 350 degrees. I decided to wait a couple of days until my parents came over to drop off Charlie at our house before leaving on their vacation. I reasoned that the temperature might be a little cooler by then, and there would be the added bonus of showing off (I mean sharing) my masterpiece with my parents. :)
The day of the great buckle-making adventure arrived. I lined up all of the ingredients I would need on the counter, tied an apron around my waist and set to work. I remembered a friend telling me once, a long time ago, that the secret to baking was simply to "clean as you go." Okay, I thought, I'll do it, and I'll have a spotless kitchen by the time I'm through baking this wonderful dessert. I was definitely feeling my inner Martha Stewart. :) Long story short, the kitchen didn't exactly look clean by the time I was finished, several sweaty hours later--alas, the heat wave was not quite over. The buckle was in the oven, but the pan wasn't the right size and every time I checked to see if it was finished, the center still wasn't cooked through. Not to mention, the lemon glaze I was stirring refused to thicken to the consistency of syrup. The two events needed to be timed perfectly, because the syrup was supposed to be poured over the cake as soon as it came out of the oven. Eventually, my glaze took on the aroma of charred lemon, and I was pretty sure that last bit of the instructions, the glaze coup de grace was not going to happen.
The good news is that the finished product did look pretty darn good--and it tasted even better! We all got to sample it and marvel at the crunchy topping combined with the soft, crumbly cake, blueberries bursting in every mouthful. As I enjoyed it, the only sad thought I had was just how little time it was going to take to eat this lovely buckle, compared to the amount of work that had gone into it. I felt almost exactly like one of those cliched 50's housewives wiping a flour-dusted hand across a sweaty brow . . . "I slaved all day to make this dessert and now I still have all of these dishes to do." *sigh*
Next time, this 21st century housewife is going to enlist the help of anyone else in her household who might want to eat whatever mouth-watering dessert is on the menu--if not as sous chef, then at least as official dishwasher extraordinaire. :)
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