Blueberry Cheesecake Loaf

Long time followers of my blog will know how much I love a sturdy loaf. So much so that I have deemed an entire section on my blog “The Sturdy Loaf Club”. I love baking fuss-free (yep, sturdy!) cakes that travel well. For many years, I was the chief cake baker and taker to potlucks and picnics at parks and reserves.

Being a rebel baker, I baked these cakes in all kinds of tins except the proverbial round cake tin. Vintage loaf tins, deeply fluted tart tins, tall panettone tins. People love a cake that doesn’t look like a cake but something that they can grab and bite into without needing a plate and fork. Loaf cakes were built for that kind of pleasure.

This Blueberry Cheesecake Loaf is a long-standing recipe that I have reverted to time and time again. Having first baked it about 12 years ago, it has had quite the evolution. But look at the beauty it has become! The deeply burnished crust, the soft golden crumb, the flecks of white cream cheese, the juicy wrinkled blueberries. A cake that is proud to hold its own without icing, cream or even icing sugar.

Often when you bake with berries, the biggest dilemma is how to keep them nicely suspended within the baked batter and not have them sinking to the bottom of the cake. Flouring the blueberries prior to adding in a standard mix-and-bake cake helps to some extent but they are still pretty much going to nose-dive in the batter.

I found the following layering technique extremely gratifying.