Recipe Book Challange #1 Blueberry Cake

We have no internet & it's like living in the dark ages, it's a bit stupid how much we rely on the net in our household & not just proving each other wrong on general knowledge. But thanks to Miss Whindler's dongle or bongle (didn't quite understand the whole thing) i'm back on line & posting. I'm actually embarrassed how long its been since i last blogged. No internet is a fairly good excuse but but the real reason is the Houseboy & i seem to be socialising way too much. Too much you say? Yes TOO MUCH. Leaving me tired, unfit & a skint, i am positively excited that the only thing on this week horizon is book club.

We recently watched the film Julia & Julia, which seems to be every food bloggers favourite film, understandably because it's about a blogger who 'makes it' after toiling over her blog cooking a recipe a day & writing it up. I'm not sure why it took me so long to get round to it, but i finally sat down & subjected the Houseboy to it (i reckon he secretly loved it) The result being that i have decided to set myself a wee challenge (not to the same ridiculous & knackering scale Julia Junior achieved) I have to cook a recipe from every cook book i have. One recipe per book per week, this will this force me to follow a recipe & use cook books i've not picked up in months years, some of them i have read countless time but not actually cooked from them. 

So the first recipe is a Blueberry Cake from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, which was a gift from someone lovely. It's a dense vanilla sponge dotted with blueberries (technically my cake was a vanilla sponge with a layer of blueberries at the bottom, but hey ho) & a nice frosting. I would warn you that this is a big cake, perfect when you are having people over for afternoon tea - not just when there's two of you. Otherwise you are both fatties. 

Ingredients:

Cake

• 350g unsalted butter
• 350g caster sugar
• 6 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 450g plain flour
• 2 tbsp + 2tsp baking powder
• 280mls sour cream
• 250g fresh blueberries (plus extra fir decorating) 

Cream Cheese Icing

• 250g cream cheese
• 100g butter (room temperature)
• 600g icing sugar

Method:

Preheat your oven to 170C (325F) Gas mark 3, & prepare a tin by lining with greaseproof paper on the bottom round the side.

Cream the butter & sugar together until light & fluffy, either using a hand held electric whisk or a mixer.  Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well and scraping any unmixed ingredients back in the batter. Then beat in the vanilla essence , flour, baking powder until well mixed. Add the sour cream & mix well until everything is combined & the mixture is light a& fluffy. Gently stir in the blueberries by hand until evenly dispersed then pour the batter into your prepared tin.

Bake for forty minutes* or until the cake springs back & is golden in colour.

While it's baking away make the frosting by combining the butter, cream cheese & icing sugar until smooth, using a food processor is fool proof. When the cake is fully cooled, take the cream cheese icing and cover the cake, lastly decorate with a few blueberries. 

I'm not sure why but my cake took FOREVER to bake - almost an hour & a half.. still came out nice & moist, also would to warn you it's a huge cake.