Basement Cake and Basement Wine

Blueberry Corn Buckle

When I was a child in Northern Florida, we would take frequent trips to the blueberry patch nearby. The abundant sunshine created HUGE hedges of bushes studded with absolutely gigantic juicy berries.

The goal was to fill your bucket, but of course half went in my mouth and I don’t ever remember leaving without a stomach ache.

My mother would turn our berry riches into a tender cake filled with berries and a crumble top, a buckle.

This recipe was one that the berry patch handed out on an ad sheet to pickers, and sadly has been lost to time and disorganization.

I’ve long hoped that it’s stuck in the pages of an old forgotten cookbook. I’m known to do that - even with a tax refund check that I inadvertently sold inside of an old book at a garage sale in my teens.

Oops. Bless the honest lady who tracked me down and returned it.

Since it has not surfaced yet, I’ve devoted many an hour to recreating the loveliness of that childhood cake. Honestly even if I had the original recipe, how could it live up to my memories?

I started making this cake in cooking classes well over a decade ago, first in a series of children’s classes based on classic picture books (Blueberries for Sal).

The sweetness of the cornmeal complements the tart berries, but trust me friends, this is NOT a cornmeal texture. More of a light, fine, golden sponge.

I have served it to countless friends, once in my muggy buggy old fashioned stone basement.

We had lovely friends over, ones I get to see far too infrequently, but our bond is always just as strong when we do get together! They had their then small toddler in tow over for dinner. As it does here, a tornado whipped up and we all had to head for the shelter of our old fashioned stone basement, home to the laundry room and often ignored exercise equipment. I grabbed the cake and forks on the way down.

We watched the weather report show the tornados blowing by and enjoyed our dessert on metal folding chairs in front of the little basement TV. I looked around the room and realized that the place was overrun with dust bunnies and jumping crickets. I hope they thoroughly sanitized the poor child after she crawled out of that mess.

I remembered my basement cake this spring when I attended a women in food writing conference in Nashville, right in the middle of a multi-day tornado fueled floodfest of a storm. It was a fabulous time with AMAZING women, but our final reception was interrupted by a fresh set of tornadoes and we all piled down in the windowless basement.

Having not made a cake that day, I grabbed a bottle of the wine that was being served and extra glasses, hoping to make a few friends.

I made friends.

It was still a great time.

None of us will soon forget it.

Bring the party to the basement when you have to friends, and on your way down grab the cake or the wine.

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Below is one of my signature recipes!

Blueberry Cornmeal Buckle