Perfectly ripe peaches and juicy blueberries top a delicious vanilla coffee cake. Breakfast? Dessert? Mid-afternoon snack? This Blueberry Peach Coffee Cake is all three!
Another summer fruit dessert? I know, I know. But I just can’t help myself with all this amazing ripe produce, especially when my CSA keeps giving it to me. It’s like someone is just begging me to make stone fruit desserts. And who am I to say no?
Spoiler alert: this is probably not the last stone fruit dessert of the season. In a few weeks, when apples and grapes and not much else take over the grocery store and farmers’ markets, we’ll be back to those heavy chocolate and peanut butter-based desserts (much to my husband’s delight).
I’m calling this a coffee cake — that all-encompassing title that implies that something is perfectly acceptable for breakfast, dessert, or a mid-day snack.
We chose to treat this as dessert, slicing away at it after dinner for a few days (and delivering some to our neighbor to ensure we didn’t eat the whole thing…), but it would be equally at home on your breakfast or brunch table.
To make this cake, you’ll need the following:
Two weeks ago, I shared a nectarine upside-down yogurt cake. This is a similar idea, but the fruit goes on top of this cake, rather than underneath. Okay, but what’s the difference?
When the fruit is on the bottom, the heat releases steam which is trapped under the batter, essentially steaming the fruit. The fruit winds up nice and soft and delicious. When the fruit is on the top, it’s more of a traditional baking process. The fruit is still soft inside, but has a little more texture (and is also delicious).
When you bake with fruit on top, the cake itself tends to rise up around the fruit a bit, so it’s not quite as pretty coming out of the oven as it is when the cake goes into the oven, but it’s so good that I promise, no one will mind if it doesn’t look quite so stunning.
The base of our blueberry peach coffee cake is a standard vanilla coffee cake. It’s delicious on its own – no mix-ins needed!
We’re going to start by creaming together the butter and sugar before adding in eggs, and then alternating adding in the flour and the milk.
The resulting batter will be thick – and this is by design! Have you ever wondered why fruit often seems to “sink” into some cakes, while staying evenly distributed in others? How do we make sure the fruit in this cake stays on top of the batter instead of falling down to the bottom? We can answer this with my favorite subject… kitchen chemistry!
Kitchen Chemistry
Whether or not fruit sinks into a cake batter depends on the viscosity of the batter. Viscosity is a measurement of a fluid’s resistance to flow. The thicker the cake batter, the more viscous it is: the molecular makeup of the liquid results in a lot of internal friction. A thick cake batter with high viscosity prevents fruit from sinking down into the batter while the cake bakes.
Of course, it’s not as simple as adding more flour or using less liquid for your favorite cake recipe – we have to develop a recipe with a specific balance of ingredients. This blueberry peach coffee cake is just the right viscosity to prevent your fruit from sinking down into the batter!
Perfectly ripe peaches and juicy blueberries top a delicious vanilla coffee cake. Breakfast? Dessert? Mid-afternoon snack? Yes, yes, and yes!
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