blueberry bundt cake

a slice of my childhood

I swear I have a really good photographic memory, but only for the cakes I ate in my childhood. I remember the birthday cakes my mom would get me every year: I would switch off between a marble cake with chocolate chip Bavarian filling and a double chocolate ganache cake with white chocolate mousse. The Swiss roll cake my grandma would buy from the Chinese market, we called it tiger bread because the outside was covered in stripes (iykyk). And this blueberry Bundt cake, which my mom would make every so often for summer barbecues or even just an after school snack. The recipe she used was from our very vintage looking, and tattered, copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook (I wish I still had it, a real relic of my days as a baking obsessed 8 year old). Originally the recipe was for a sour cream coffee cake, but if I remember correctly there was a footnote at the bottom of the recipe saying you could substitute the coffee cake filling with a can of blueberry pie filling. Or, my mom thought of it herself — either way it’s the only rendition of the recipe she ever made. She always used the same brand of blueberry pie filling, it had a very corn syrupy smell that made the cake so distinct. I spent some time this morning googling “canned blueberry pie filling” to see if I could find the exact one, but to no avail. The recipe I’m sharing with you today is an almost identical, straight from miss crocker’s website, version of my mom’s cake, save for the canned blueberry pie filling that definitely had food coloring, preservatives and other weird stuff (no hate, but we deserve fresh blueberries ). I added lemon zest and vanilla bean to really perfume the cake with flavor and make it more luscious than it already is. I also increased the sour cream to use an entire 16 oz container, because measuring sour cream sucks and who wants that tiny annoying bit leftover in your fridge. Oh and I doubled the salt, duh. Eating a slice of this cake after 15 something years, felt like a warm soft much needed hug. It’s just as unbelievably delicious as it was when my mom would make it, canned pie filling and all.