book clubs and blueberry boy bait

One of my highest hopes for The Kitchen Daughter is that it finds a happy home with book clubs. I've been in a book club in every city I've lived in since college, including a great group of ladies here in NYC. Last week, we just had our second meeting. How was the discussion of A Reliable Wife? Excellent. How was the food? Off. The. Charts.

Flatbread with leeks and potatoes. Roasted beets with almonds, feta, and green apples. Quinoa. Strawberry-rhubarb pie. And more. Plus wine, of course.

Me? After some very smart advice from a participant on the weekly Washington Post food chat, pointing to my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen, I whipped up a half-batch of Blueberry Boy Bait, an absurdly delicious airy-textured butter cake dotted with blueberries and dusted with cinnamon sugar.

Mmmmmmm.

(My pictures are nowhere near as good as Deb's but I had to give it a shot.)

The recipe's got a few tricks to it -- you can't just toss everything in the stand mixer and hope for the best -- but the end product is so delicious and irresistible that I highly recommend finding somewhere else to be for the 20 minutes after it comes out of the oven. Because letting it cool in the pan for 20 minutes, with that taunting buttery cinnamon smell, is a real test of willpower.

 

(This test, I failed. I couldn't wait. It was so soft I had to take the corner out with a spoon, but take the corner out I did.)

In sum: YUM. Whether you're baiting a boy, or fueling a book discussion, this one works wonders.

(Incidentally, I've tagged "book news" for this post for good reason -- I've finally turned in the final version of the manuscript! Yes, I may invoke the word "final" a couple more times -- we've still got copy edits to go, after all -- but this is a big moment of DONE. Yay! Perhaps I should... bake a cake?)

Comments

[Erika Robuck]

The picture with the cinnamon and blueberries: to die for! And the end result! Oh my!

[Tracy Hahn-Burkett]

Congrats on the book news! And yes, a cake is in order--blueberry or otherwise. (BTW, I don't care what you say about those photos, when I look at them, I smell cinnamon.)