Easy and Elegant: Blueberry Dump Cake Dessert

I’m on a mission to cook recipes with the blueberries on my backyard bush. It has my creative ideas going. The berries don’t last long — it’s a huge crop (for me). Here’s a second easy and elegant dessert to make with the blueberries. It is so simple — it fools you. This is a “dump” cake recipe, meaning that you just dump the ingredients directly into the baking dish and mix– no mixing bowls clean up.

The idea for this recipe came from my mother-in-law who sent along a recipe for a fabulous dessert made with crushed pineapple, butter, brown sugar and a box of yellow cake mix. It sounded delicious, but very, very rich. I decided to substitute blueberries and tone down the sugar and butter just a bit — for the sake of good nutrition.

Recipe

The recipe has only six ingredients. The filling is blueberries, sugar, lemon juice and a little water. The topping is a box of yellow cake mix and butter. Very simple!  And I used Pam Butter Spray, too. (Not shown.)

There are endless possibilities for including other ingredients. I’ve seen recipes with coconut flakes, nuts and many other types of fruits. Yum!

In the process of making the recipe, I adapted things somewhat to a smaller recipe — it would be easy to double the recipe. I used  an 8″ round Pyrex cake pan to make the dessert and ended up needing only half of the box of cake mix. Use a 9″ x 13″ baking pan to accommodate the entire box of cake mix and 4 cups of blueberries rather than 2 cups.

To make the dessert, wash, clean and drain the blueberries. Pour them into the oiled or buttered Pyrex baking dish. Add lemon juice, a little water (or the dessert will be very dry) and sugar. Mix gently to combine.

Sprinkle 1/2 of the box of dry cake mix on top of the blueberries. This is 1-1/2 cups of dry cake mix. You don’t mix up the cake mix as directly on the package–the dry mix is used. Then cut butter in thin slivers and lay on top. Bake until the topping is brown and the blueberries are bubbly.

Partially during the baking, I realized that some of the cake mix was still dry and my best efforts to spread the melted butter wasn’t working. My solution was to spray the dry cake mix with Pam Butter Spray. Fortunately it worked!  All the cake mix topping browned nicely.

Serve with a scoop of ice cream. This dessert is delicious.

I have about 1 cup of blueberries remaining to use. A batch of the blueberries ripens ever several days. The berries that are picked too early will finish ripening and darken in a few days. I leave them set at room temperature (don’t refrigerate them).  What should I make with these last berries? Perhaps a blueberry pound cake; or perhaps I’ll just mix the fresh blueberries with fruit in a fruit salad (healthy idea). We’ll see.