As I type, I’m headed home from British Columbia, completely full from a couple of weeks of riding, cooking, beaching, forest bathing, picking berries and all the other deeply good things to be done in the Pacific Northwest in the summertime.
There were so so many favorite parts; watching the sunrise over the mountains, watching seal pups chase each other in the waters near the house. BBQing oysters in my bikini, taking queues from the bears and parking our bikes in a berry thicket to harvest tiny red and purple fruits, staining our gloves and teeth with sweet juice, paddling in the ocean until the sunset.
The berry picking and eating part – every chance we got – was particularly poignant. We made sure to completely raid the blackberry thicket in front of the cottage on Hornby Island and transported cartons, boxes, and jars of our haul of tiny gems to the house in Whistler, where I did my very best to cook them into everything all week.
There are so many options when it comes to fresh berries but after some deep consideration, we all agreed that a simple, sliceable cake that could cozy up to a scoop of ice cream just as easily as it could be dunked in mugs of milk and coffee for breakfast was a favorite idea. And so, this Blackberry Muffin Cake was born.
This is just the type of recipe that I hope you have on hand all the time, dear friends. One that’s simple in preparation, honest in its purpose, and damn good because there are few things more lovely than a slice of cake besides a slice of cake studded with fresh berries you plucked with your own hands.
Because that sorta misses the point.
Blackberries – especially on the Pacific Coast but really anywhere right now as August lulls us into the deep summer – are IN SEASON. Right now. Right NOW.
Not in the winter. Not later. NOW. Go out to your front yard, put on your mountain biking gloves, or gardening gloves, and pick the bejeezus out of them. Or ask your neighbors if you can pick theirs. Or, go to your local farmer’s market and buy what the farmers in your area are growing. Do it now. Your cake is bound to be among the best things you’ve ever tasted – pinky swear.
But please, don’t go to the grocery store in the middle of the winter and buy tiny pints of fresh berries – flown from California, or Mexico – to make this easy little cake. For that will partially defeat the purpose of this cake and my sharing it with you right now.
In season is the way that our bodies want us to eat. Blackberries have all of the cooling, energizing, and anti-inflammatory benefits that our bodies want right now in the heat. The kind that benefits us during the summer by initiating chill mode, from the inside out. Eating this way aligns us with nature in a way that we cannot replicate with a supplement, a smoothie, or packaged food promising alignment. No.
The berries you buy in the grocery store year-round have traveled an insane amount of distance to reach you. The carbon footprint of these berries is massive. Not to mention that they taste like absolutely NOTHING. Eaten in the dead of winter, these berries taste tart and metallic and disorient our digestive systems to the climate in Peru or Mexico or California…
But the berries picked right now, baked into this case and savored in this summer moment taste like sweet candy. Like sun kissing your skin, like the grassy smells of the bramble, like salty fingers and slightly salty wind, like tender morsels of nature’s tiniest gems.
If we wanna be present. Be powerful in the NOW, we have to eat in the NOW – right here, where we are, the ingredients Ma Nature is giving us.
You can use frozen berries here. But you’ll want to use fewer of them, because frozen berries will leach too much liquid into the cake, and it won’t bake properly. And also, frozen berries – too – have flown or driven a long distance to reach you. Instead, I recommend studding your cake with whatever fruits you have on hand that are local to your home – a peach muffin cake, strawberry muffin cake or plum muffin cake would also be divine.
It is of note, however, that frozen berries have a smaller carbon footprint than fresh – they are flash frozen upon picking and then travel slower routes in refrigerated trucks, maintaining maybe more of the flavor they were picked with? But still.
These berries are conventionally grown, in a field cultivated just to churn out berries year after year. The soil they’re growing in is tired and needs a rest. And we know that when we don’t give ourselves enough rest, we don’t assimilate our nutrition, or feel we have time to care for ourselves and our loved ones. Under these circumstances, our nutritional value starts to wane; that’s right – we become less potent and powerful. And that’s what’s happening to the berries too.
You can absolutely substitute frozen berries but think pretty hard about how and why you’re buying them at the store. It’s ok to save this recipe until next summer when the berries are back in season again – you’ll have it in your back pocket for when the berry brambles are full again.
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