Blueberry Cake With Lemon Frosting

Just wait until you taste it! It’s ridiculously good!

Blueberry Cake

When time is short, we make a quick, wooden spoon-mixed Lemon Blueberry Yogurt Cake. But when you want to bake a cake to impress, we make THIS Blueberry Cake! It is a complete and utter celebration of blueberries, bundled up in a combination that can’t be beat: A lemon-infused plush cake adapted from this Vanilla Cake, which in itself has amassed a loyal following from all around the world. Juicy pops of blueberry littered throughout. And that fluffy creamy Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting … Words fail me. It’s just to-die-for!!

What you need for blueberry cake

Here’s what you need for the cake batter:

Sour cream – The Vanilla Cake batter uses milk, which makes a thin batter so the blueberries would sink to the base. By switching milk with sour cream, the batter becomes thick enough to suspend blueberries throughout whilst still achieving the same velvety, fluffy crumb;Flour – Just plain/all-purpose flour works better here than cake flour. However, if you can only get cake flour, that works just fine. The only difference is that the cake surface becomes tacky the next day (not really a big deal in this frosted cake);Sugar – Superfine / caster sugar is best as it dissolves more readily. But ordinary granulated white sugar is fine too. Please do not attempt to substitute with brown sugar or any sugar substitutes;Butter – Unsalted, the default for baking;Eggs – Fresher is better, and at room temperature. Fresh eggs fluff better, and fridge-cold eggs take longer to fluff to the same volume. If you don’t know how, here’s how to check how fresh your eggs are;Baking powder – For lifting power. If you don’t use yours regularly, make sure sure it’s still good. Inactive baking powder is a common hidden culprit of cake fails;Vanilla – For flavour;Salt – Just a little brings out the flavours of everything else in the cake; andOil – For a touch of extra moisture but more importantly, it keeps the cake fresh for 5 days. Any neutral flavoured oil works fine here – vegetable, canola, peanut etc.

For the add-ins:

Blueberries – Tossing in a tiny bit of flour helps ensure that the blueberries remain suspended in the cake batter as it cooks; andLemons – We use the zest in the cake, and the juice in the frosting.

Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

Here’s what you need for the cream cheese frosting.

Icing sugar – Called powdered sugar in America. Heads up Australia: be sure to use soft icing sugar not pure icing sugar. The latter is used for icing intended to be firm, such as Royal Icing used to decorate Gingerbread Men. We don’t want that here!

Cream cheese – It must be the brick form which is intended for cooking purposes, not the softer spreadable type that comes in tubs. The recipe calls for it to be at room temperature which is around 17°C/63°F for baking purposes. This is necessary so it blends with the butter easily. But don’t let it get too soft. Cream cheese is already softer than butter, so if it gets too soft, you’ll end up with a sloppy frosting. If this happens to you, you can just fix it by refrigerating the bowl for 30 minutes, then beating again to fluff it up.Note: There’s a slightly higher ratio of cream cheese in this than what I use for my Carrot Cake Frosting because the lemon juice thins it out, and also I want it to have a touch more structure so it doesn’t ooze out when you cut the cake.

How to make Blueberry Cake

The batter for this cake is based on my Vanilla Cake in which I already provided comprehensive process steps and The Why for. Rather than repeating it all, I’ll focus on the essentials relevant to this particular cake. The recipe calls for it to be at room temperature which is around 17°C/63°F for baking purposes. This is necessary so it blends with the butter easily. But don’t let it get too soft. Cream cheese is already softer than butter, so if it gets too soft, you’ll end up with a sloppy frosting. If this happens to you, you can just fix it by refrigerating the bowl for 30 minutes, then beating again to fluff it up. Note: There’s a slightly higher ratio of cream cheese in this than what I use for my Carrot Cake Frosting because the lemon juice thins it out, and also I want it to have a touch more structure so it doesn’t ooze out when you cut the cake. But to briefly recap the key points of Vanilla Cake: This method is safer than the usual “cream butter and sugar” cakes, and yields a plush, velvety, professional bakery-style crumb. And it stays 100% fresh for 5 days!

Toss blueberries with a little flour. This will help ensure they stay suspended throughout the cake as it bakes. We also set aside some blueberries to scatter across the top for decoration;
Beat eggs & sugar for 7 minutes until tripled in volume. This is the secret to the beautifully light, plush texture of the cake!
Add dry ingredients – Whisk the dry cake ingredients in a bowl (ie. flour, baking powder, salt). Add the dry Ingredients in 3 batches to whipped egg mix, mixing on Speed 1 for 5 seconds after each addition. Stop as soon as most of the flour is mixed in;
Sour cream mixture – Whisk sour cream, hot butter, oil, vanilla and lemon zest in your now-empty flour bowl. The mixture will be quite thick, and you will see little lumps which is the zest;
Lighten the sour cream mixture – Add some of the egg batter into the sour cream mixture. The purpose of this step is to lighten the sour cream mixture before combining it with the batter so it is incorporated more easily. The batter is beautifully aerated and this technique thus helps preserve all those air bubbles we created in Step 2.
Mix on low speed until just combined – we don’t want to knock out all those air bubbles we created, remember!
Blueberries – Stir through the flour-coated blueberries;
Cakes pans – Divide the batter between the cake pans, smooth the surface, then scatter with reserved non flour-coated blueberries. These end up sinking while cooking to just below the surface of the cake. This in turn helps with a more even distribution of the blueberries (figured out yet that I’m kinda fussy? 😂);
Bake for 24 minutes, then cool upside down on a rack. Why upside down? Because it will flatten out any slight doming on the upper surface so there’s no need to trim to make the cakes level. You’ll know straightaway when you touch the cake that it’s a very special cake because you can feel how plush and velvety it is even on the surface. Be sure to let it cool fully before frosting, otherwise it will melt your frosting!

How to make Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

The key to a fluffy cream cheese frosting is to beat, beat, beat! To make the frosting, cream the butter first. Add the cream cheese and whip, then add the icing sugar/powdered sugar and beat for 3 minutes until it’s fluffy. Add a pinch of salt, vanilla and lemon juice at the end, and beat again just to mix through. Spread on each layer of the cake, the top and the sides. We’re all in for this one! Butter-based frostings can get sloppy when worked in hot ambient temperatures (ie Aussie summer!). It’s easy to fix: just refrigerate the frosting in the bowl for 30 minutes, then beat again just before use. Also, if at any point while frosting the cake it gets too runny, just refrigerate the whole cake for 15 minutes and keep going. I’ve made this cake as a 3-layer cake because . well, speaking frankly, this isn’t a 10 minute, one-bowl cake. So if I’m making the effort to make it, I want to go all out. And, more layers = higher ratio of frosting to cake. But it can be made as a 2-layer cake, or 2 x single layered individual cakes, or one large rectangular cake.

To ensure success …

Firstly, I want to highlight that this recipe was developed with all sorts of safety measures in place so it’s as fail-safe as it can be. It is much more reliable than typical cake recipes that start with “cream butter and sugar”, and the results are far better. Secondly, 6 years of baking questions from readers has given me invaluable insight into the most common causes of issues with baking! So here are my top tips to ensure success: You’ve got this. And just imagine the gasps of delight when you pull out that first slice … because it happens, every time!! – Nagi x