Time to bake another loaf. These are becoming another of my top bakes, aside from my beloved cupcakes of course. They are just so easy to make and always turn out wonderfully moist and full of flavour. The decision to make this particular loaf was down the the short recipe. It only has 4 stages and everything is standard loaf ingredients except the blueberries and soured cream substitute for the plain yoghurt. I wanted a quick recipe on Sunday as in the morning I was participating in Race for Life at the Epsom Downs Racecourse. Its a 5km (3 mile) walk which I do every year. Last year I was 6 months pregnant at the time and so it seemed fitting this year that my 9 month old daughter should take part as well. She was in a baby carrier strapped to my chest for the entire walk and we completed it, in the baking 30 degree sun, in one hour and 13 minutes. A better time than I did last year and I was carrying a lot more weight this time.
Being exhausted after the race and a little sunburnt I was lacking in motivation to actually bake anything but pushed myself to get it down when the baby went down for her nap. Whacked the oven on to preheat at the usual 170C, assembled all my ingredients and equipment and started by greasing the laof tin with butter and then dusting with flour.
Then the butter and sugar are creamed together, add the eggs one at a time then the rest of the dry ingredients in two batches. My hand slipped as I was pouring the first batch into the mixture and so ended up with about 80/20 rather than 50/50 but it didn't matter, all going into the same bowl in the end.
Once the usual suspects are mixed together you add the soured cream and whole blueberries. I used fresh blueberries as I know if I bought frozen I would 1) forget to defrost them beforehand and 2) the rest of them wouldn't get eaten and the bag would sit at the back of the freezer for decades. Fresh is always better any way. These are folded in by hand and then poured into the prepared loaf tin. I managed to get the blueberries evenly distributed in the batter and was hoping they wouldn't all settle to the bottom, even though the cook book states this is perfectly normal.
It took a little longer to cook as expected. My oven used to be bang on time for all the recipes but it seems as of late it takes slightly longer for the loaves and cheesecakes. The cupcakes still seem to cook within the normal time though. Dunno why that is but it doesn't seem to affect the end result. Just need to make sure I rotate them half way through as it seems to cook a little unevenly on the right too.
The loaf was intended to come to a family bbq with us that evening. Wanted to impress the long time family friends I would be meeting for the first time since getting together with my husband. The loaf was still too warm to take with us so I settled on taking the remaining Lemon Meringue cupcakes instead. Meant we had the loaf all to ourselves once we got home and I delved in straight away. The Blueberries had indeed mostly sunk to the bottom, so the top half of the loaf was just sponge and the bottom had all the fruit in it. You couldn't taste the soured cream but it did have a different taste than when using the plain yoghurt as all the other loaves do. I am not usually one to eat blueberries but in this they were delicious. My husband had a slice after me and agreed it was yummy. So much so that when I came down the next morning after having gone to bed before him, only half of the loaf remained!
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