Three Berry Crumb Cake

I was sitting on an airplane reading Woman’s World Magazine when I found this recipe. Being very hungry at the time, I couldn’t stop looking at the photo. I went to the store for ingredients as soon as I got home, but didn’t get around to baking the cake until this morning.

I took some liberties with the formatting of the recipe, but it’s still the creation (as far as I know) of the food editor’s at Woman’s World. And yes, it’s a cake mix based cake. I know some of you don’t like cake mix, but maybe you could take the idea and use your favorite scratch base. While everyone loved the cake mix version, I might try it with Flo Braker’s scratch buttermilk cake recipe next time just for fun.

Note the butter. I used salted butter in the cake and the topping. Since the topping doesn’t have any added salt, I recommend sticking with salted butter. If you only have unsalted butter, you should probably add about 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the topping mixture so it won’t taste flat.

Since I was going for convenience here, I used frozen berries. Fresh berries would have cost about $10.00, and I wasn’t ready to splurge for that, seeing that this was a convenience type cake. The frozen berries worked, but they did add some extra moisture to the topping. We kind of liked it that way, though…it was like having cobbler on top of cake. Still, now that I know how good the overall cake is, I’d probably spend money on the fresh.

Woman’s World Three Berry Crumb Cake

Cake:
1 (18.25 oz) box yellow cake mix, I used Betty Crocker Butter Recipe Yellow
8 tablespoons butter (1 stick), softened
3 eggs
1 teaspoon lemon zest (yellow part of peel)
Buttermilk — measurement given for whatever type of liquid is on cake mix. I used 1 1/4 cups buttermilk.

Topping:
2 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
12 tablespoons butter, melted – I used salted
1 ½ cups (more or less), fresh* mixed berries – strawberries, blueberries, blackberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 9 inch springform pan with flour-added cooking spray.

In a mixing bowl, mix together cake mix, butter, eggs, lemon zest and buttermilk. Beat for 2 minutes, using high speed of electric mixer. Pour into pan, spread to edges of pan and bake for 45 minutes.

Prepare topping. In a mixing bowl, mix together flour, brown sugar, cinnamon and melted butter. Crumble it up.

Sprinkle some of the crumb mixture over top of cooked cake. Lay some fruit over the crumb mixture, then top with remaining crumb mixture. Return to oven and bake for another 25 minutes. Let pan cool on a wire rack.

Serves 10