Hi there,

My friend, Pam, who is a wonderful and amusing writer, shared with me this story about her dear mother, who she lost to Covid last year, and this family recipe for Blueberry Delight. I know you will enjoy her story. And if you get a chance read this post about her mother and a tattoo. It can be found at https://roughwighting.net/2021/09/03/a-piercing-experience/

My mom, Marcia, wasn’t a baker. Growing up in the U.S. Northeast, we rarely had cookies; when we did, they were store-bought. Mom made a cake three times a year: one for me in March, one for my brother in October, and one for my dad in January. Rarely did I see her eat any of these sweet concoctions. She just didn’t have a sweet tooth.

But one summer when she visited me in California where I was raising my own family, my two children picked blackberries from a friend’s three huge wild blackberry bushes.

“Shall we rinse them and put them on our Cheerios in the morning?” I wondered out loud.

“No! Let’s use Nanny’s blueberry cake recipe,” my mom suggested. What? I’d never seen (nor experienced) my grandmother’s Blueberry Cake.

Amazingly, Mom knew it from heart, even though she hadn’t baked it in ages, and certainly not while I was growing up! Even though the recipe called for blueberries, we threw in the fresh blackberries instead. I was worried that she really didn’t know what she was doing when we poured a cup of boiling water over the ingredients. But lo and behold, the cake was so luscious we made it about once a week while we had fresh blackberries.

Now that I live back on the East Coast, and particularly now that it’s blueberry season, my family, including the grandchildren, beg for “Nanny’s Blueberry Cake.” In a wonderful circular way, I called my grandmother Nanny, and my children called my mom Nanny, and so did her great-grandkids.

Ingredients:

2 cups berries

Juice ½ a lemon

8” square pan. Put berries on the bottom of the pan and sprinkle with lemon juice.

¾ cup sugar

3 Tbls butter

½ cup milk

1 cup sifted flour

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

Directions:

Cream sugar and butter then slowly add the milk with the sifted dry ingredients. Spread batter over the fruit.

Combine 1 cup of sugar, ½-1 Tbls of cornstarch, ¼ tsp of salt. Mix and sprinkle this on top of the batter and pour 1 cup of boiling water over that.

Bake 375 for 1 hour. Serve warm with dollop of vanilla ice cream.

I hope you have enjoyed meeting Pam. If you would like to read more about her and enjoy her writing, she can be found at: https://roughwighting.net

Talk soon, ❤️💕 Bernadette