Coconut Blueberry Cozy Coffee Cake for a Winter Day

Spring is fickle. One day its warm and green sprouts are popping up. The next day there’s a major snow storm. Like today. This is what its doing out there.

A great day to stay home. Except we had tickets to a Comic Con downtown. *grumps* But I can’t exactly be mad about staying inside and being cozy on a wintery day. Yes, I’ll just get my blanket and watch a movie! After I do laundry, clean the bathrooms, and think about dinner. And bake something. See, this is why I don’t rest much.

Once again I had some geriatric fruit that needed to be put out of its misery. So I leafed through my huge stack of “recipes I’d like to try” to find something. I found a Coconut Blueberry Cake with Lemon Glaze. Bingo! (God knows how long I’ve held on this recipe)

In searching my supplies I discovered that my cooking oil had that old, yicky smell. I never like using a whole cup or even a half a cup of oil in baking. I know it’s needed, but geesh, that’s a lot of oil. I decided to substitute apple sauce and one old banana. Also I was suspicious about the validity of my baking powder. It says it expired in January. But that’s what my baking adventures are all about!! Also, I didn’t quite have 1 ½ cups of blueberries, I just used what I had (which was hardly a cup, I’d say)

Everything mixed up nicely and baked pretty well. Except I felt it wasn’t browning, like, at all. So I left it in a total of about 30 minutes. And though it never browned up a lot, it did seem to be cooked all the way through and it wasn’t totally flat, so the baking powder wasn’t completely bad.

To make the glaze it called for lemon rind. Okay, who, outside of people who live in the south and have lemon trees in their yard keep lemons on hand?? I will buy one when cooking plans call for it. But they aren’t laying around here. So I made due with the dried lemon peel and kinda fake lemon juice in the plastic lemon (like that fools anyone). The glaze cooked up fine also, but I started feeling kind of bad about those hard flecks of lemon peel. So I strained them out. If you're savvy enough to keep fresh lemon on hand, you won’t need to do this.

Mr. M. and I had a piece while it was all still hot. It was yum, I gotta say. And Mr. M. agreed. It was a denser cake, which made it seem more like a coffee cake. I feel like you can never go wrong with a nice coffee cake on a snowy day, though, right??

Coconut Blueberry Coffee Cake
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
¼ tsp salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup vegetable oil or apple sauce
1 ½ cup blueberries
1 cup flake coconut

In a bowl combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In another bowl beat eggs, milk and oil/apple sauce. Stir into dry ingredients just until moist. Fold in blueberries and coconut.
Transfer to a greased 13”X 9” baking dish. Bake at 375 for 22-24 min.

Lemon Sauce
½ cup sugar
4 ½ tsps cornstarch
1 tsp grated lemon peel
1 cup water
1 T butter
2 T lemon juice

In a small saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch and lemon peel. Gradually add water until blended. Bring to a boil, cook and stir for 2 min or until thickened. Remove from heat, stir in butter and lemon juice. Drizzle sauce on pieces of cake.