Barefoot Berry Baking Bash

The raspberries are here! The raspberries are here!


I wait all year for raspberry season. As a child, raspberries always seemed like a luxury to me, arriving at the supermarket in tiny ½ pint packages. You could always buy a full pint of blueberries for the same price, so blueberries became the blue-collar berry in my mind, and raspberries were reserved for the upper echelon.

In sixth grade, as part of my school report on Sweden, I wanted to make a Swedish raspberry dessert. You think I would’ve made meatballs, right? But no, I wanted raspberries. I remember my mother’s anxiety at the price of enough frozen raspberries to feed 20 kids as part of her little girl’s school project. That incident cemented raspberries in my mind as a luxury item.

My infatuation with raspberries continues today. Raspberries even crowned our wedding cake. So it’s no surprise that we have a few raspberry bushes in the garden, and this season has given us a glorious harvest. With the recent cooler weather here in N.Dak, I thought this was a great time to do some berry baking.

My copy of Barefoot Contessa at Home had a few recipes that I wanted to try, so I started with double berry muffins. Don’t they look pretty in the book?


So I took our first precious raspberries and mixed them in the batter with some workhorse blueberries, adding a little extra of this and a little less of that, my usual baking M.O. Well, I don’t know what happened. Did I overmix the batter? Every muffin recipe warns you not to overmix. Or did I undermix? Was my baking powder old? Or did I overfill the pan? I’m still stumped as to why my muffins turned out like this:


Seeing my distress, my gracious husband immediately grabbed one and proclaimed “They taste great!” He even managed to get each muffin out of the tin using a scrape-and-peel technique that I would associate more with skinning a deer than baking breakfast goods. Delicioso, no?

Ok, that didn’t work out too well. Then I saw the blueberry crumb cake a few pages later in the same cookbook. I gave it a whirl, but my improvising habit kicked in immediately. Whole milk yogurt instead of sour cream. More lemon. Less butter. More berries. A little whole wheat flour. Different pan. Why do I do this? Someone once said baking is chemistry mixed with poetry. Why do I always emphasize the poetic side of baking and try to cheat the chemistry side?



Luck was on my side that day and the cake still turned out. I’m still trying to find the right crumb-to-cake ratio, but this was pretty darn decent. I think I was just excited that it looked presentable after the muffin incident.


More importantly, this was a reminder that my reaction to situations usually matters more than the situation itself. Know what I mean? If I screw up, I have two options: a) get steaming mad or b) deal with it, laugh about it, learn from it, and move on. And sometimes something I perceive as a screw-up (i.e. ugly muffins) can actually be a beautiful thing (i.e. delicious muffins).

Or I could just follow a recipe as written for once. But where’s the fun in that?

I’m not posting a recipe this time; this crumb cake was better and I’m willing to bet that you can substitute summer berries for the rhubarb. Just cut way down on the sugar you use to coat the fruit and replace the ginger with lemon...

There I go, improvising again.