My husband has an insatiable sweet tooth and lucky for him he can eat sweets and stay thin. So I’m always looking to make something for him, and there are times I just don’t want a lot of fuss getting it done. When that happens, this recipe allows me to make him something fresh without a lot of work on my part. And oh, did I happen to mention – it tastes divine!

I love baking with blueberries. When they get hot enough they burst and release sweet juices into whatever it is you’re making. This particular quick bread is loaded with them and when you add the lemon zest to the batter and frost it with lemon glaze, the combination of flavors are to die for.

So not only is this a great tasting sweet loaf, it’s quick and utterly delicious. So let’s talk lemon blueberry quick bread…

Lesson Learned 1 – Be careful when baking with blueberries: Blueberries can be tricky and believe me I’ve had my failures where blueberries are concerned. You have to coat them with a small amount of flour before you put them in the batter. If you don’t they’ll all sink to the bottom of your bread and you’ll have a blueberry mess on your hands.

It’s very important that you coat with blueberries thoroughly with the amount indicated in the recipe. I’ve also made the mistake of thinking they were fully coated and pouring them into the batter only to find that there was still a bunch of flour on the bottom of the bowl. I recommend that you place your blueberries in a small cereal bowl and stir them from the bottom of the bowl up. That way you’ll know that you’re using all the flour. Check the bottom of the bowl for any residual flour. If there is some, scoop it on top of the blueberries and continue to stir until there’s no flour on the bottom of the bowl when you pour the blueberries into the batter.

This quick bread was so good I made it twice within the span of a week. The second time I tried a few tweaks and I liked the way the bread turned out even better. One of the tweaks I did was change the amount of blueberries. Originally I used 1 cup of blueberries in the recipe and the bread was loaded with blueberries. Don’t get me wrong, that was fine, but I felt the blueberries were a tad overpowering. The second time I only used 3/4 cup of blueberries and I liked that ratio of blueberries to batter much better. So I recommend using only 3/4 cup of blueberries.

Another trick I used to avoid having the blueberries sink to the bottom of the cake – once the batter was in the baking pan I used a small spoon, dipped it into the batter and scooped some of the blueberries up to the top. I went about half way down in the batter and did a few scoops to make sure all the blueberries didn’t settle in one place. Doing a few scoops with the spoon and making sure the blueberries were completely coated in the flour gave a good distribution of blueberries in the batter.

Lesson Learned 2 – High altitude baking: I live in the Denver area which is 5,000 feet above sea level. When you live in high altitude it affects your baking and you need to make adjustments in order to get your desired results. If you don’t make adjustments your cakes and sweet breads will wind up sinking in the middle with the edges being more than done. It’s frustrating. And it takes some time to get used to high altitude baking.

The main difference between high altitude and sea level baking is air pressure. The higher the altitude the lower the air pressure, and lower air pressure plays havoc with baking. The King Arthur Flour’s website has an excellent article explaining why adjustments need to be made with high altitude baking and recommended adjustments for cakes, cookies and the like. If you’re in high altitude I highly recommend you check it out. I will write out the recipe with sea level ingredients and put in parenthesis the high altitude adjustments. Keep in mind my adjustments are for 5,000 feet. If you’re at 3,000 or 7,000 the adjustments change. The article gives specific adjustments for those altitudes as well. And if you’re at sea level (which I was for many years) just follow the recipe as is. You’ve got nothing to worry about. The link to the article is directly below:

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/learn/high-altitude-baking.html

Other than how to work with blueberries and how to adjust for high altitude this quick bread is super simple to make and super delicious. Try it out and tell me what you think…