I asked on my instagram tonight how many of you all are fans of chicken pot pie. I’m pretty sure the poll ended in a landslide in favor of this amazing dish that is quite possibly the superior choice of all casserole-like dinners.

I mean who doesn’t love a one-dish meal, baked up in cast iron, served nice and warm on a cold January night?

Especially when it’s a perfect use of the left-over chicken from our whole chicken meal a few nights ago.

While it seems only natural that the chicken pot pie is accredited to New England, since we certainly need the wonderful-smelling, deeply filling goodness on many a long, dark, cold night, I have no idea what the history truly is and why folks call one with a biscuit top (and no “bottom”) the New England version.

But I can tell you, as a mid-Atlantic girl transplanted to New England 6 years ago, folks up here are practical. No nonsence. To the point.

So this kind of pot pie only makes sense. Why waste time making a bottom that isn’t necessary and why not load the top with a thick, flaky, carb-filled biscuit? It makes a cold night a little better, no?

While I’ve never typed this up before, soooo many of you were asking for the recipe when I shared the picture of our dinner on instagram tonight.

So here you go.

Let me know what you think!

Oh, and we are admittedly not a fan of peas, so we prefer green beans in our pot pie. Feel free to desecrate it with peas instead, just don’t tell me, okay?

Ingredients for New England Pot Pie

Filling:

• 2 small onions, finely diced
• 1 medium carrot, sliced thinly
• 3 medium potatoes, cubed
• 1 cup canned green beans, cut into bite-size chunks
• 2-3 cups chicken, shredded (I use leftovers from a whole chicken meal)
• salt, pepper, or season salt, to taste (I love this season salt)
• 1 1/2 cups chicken broth
• a roux of flour and water*
• 1 cup half-and-half

* I always judge this as I’m making it, maybe start with 1 cup water and 1/4 cup flour? Adjust until it’s a light thickness that will nicely add weight to your filling.

Biscuit top:

• 1 TB baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt (this is my all-time favorite)
• 2 cups flour (I mill my own with my Harvest Mill and hard white wheat berries from Azure Standard)
• 1/4 cup butter or coconut oil (I use our farm-raised lard)
• 1 cup milk

Directions to Make New England Pot Pie

1. In prepared, hot, oiled or buttered 12″ cast iron skillet, cook onions, potatoes and carrots until they start to soften. Add in chicken and green beans and season to taste.

2. In a saucepan, warm chicken broth and half-and-half, wisking in your roux until well blended. Wisk constantly over medium heat until the sauce thickens. Pour over the chicken mixture in your skillet.

3. Preheat oven to 425.

4. To make your biscuit top, mix the first 3 ingredients in a large bowl. Then cut in your butter or lard with a pastry cutter. Add the milk and combine so the dough forms a ball. Knead lightly then press out to a circle that will fit the top of your cast iron pan. I use my 12″ like this. Once your filling is ready, lay the biscuit top on top and crimp the edges a little to “fit” them to the skillet.

5. Cut a few openings in the top and bake at 425 until the juices bubble up through the slits in your nicely browned biscuit top. It will take about 1/2 hour to bake to perfection.

Other recipes in cast iron you’ll love:

Grandma’s Melt-in-your-Mouth Blueberry Cake

Sour Dough Bread Bowls

Pizza Baked on Cast Iron

A Giant Cookie Baked in Cast Iron

My favorite kitchen tools in my farmhouse kitchen are all right here

From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. John 1:16

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Even in the midst of a viral pandemic that is sweeping the world. Even after a not-so-great sugar season, that gave us about 1/2 the total amount of maple syrup that we usually make. Even in the midst of a cold, dreary, gray-sky spring day that doesn’t feel like spring… Even then, these bowls make me happy.

How to Make Sourdough Bread Bowls

So today I’m sharing with you how I make these little edible bowls that hold my soup and cheer my day.

If you’re new to sourdough

Actually, there isn’t much to it, if you know how to make sourdough to begin with. If you’re new to sourdough, I got ya covered. I didn’t take up this art of bread making until recently myself, so I remember all too well the aura of elusiveness and difficulty that surrounded the mysterious sour-tasting, wild-yeast filled bread. Well, at least in my mind.

Once I just forced myself to take the plunge, sink or swim, succeed or fail, good crumb or bad, I realized it’s a pretty forgiving thing…. this “thing” of sourdough breadmaking.

I documented every step–every detail of how I make my sourdough bread–from creating your first starter to pulling the amazingness out of the hot oven, in this post all about Making Sourdough Bread.

This post contains affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.

Yes, you can adapt it to fit your needs

To make sourdough bread bowls, I simply follow the recipe that I shared with you a few weeks ago (see my sourdough bread recipe right here), and I form 3-4 small balls of dough that I bake in this dutch oven that I love for bread baking. Yes, you do have to bake them all separately. Unless you have a couple dutch ovens (which believe it or not I do) and a large oven that will hold two dutch ovens at one time (which, sadly, I don’t).

And, yes, your dough will be much smaller than the circumference of your dutch oven. That’s totally fine. I remember the first time I did this I thought the bread would flatten out into a useless dough circle, but rest assured the dough will rise in the ball and be a nice little bowl for you.

Once the bread has cooled, cut out a divet into the round loaf so you have a bowl on the bottom and a wonderful (albeit odd shaped) piece of bread to eat with your soup.

Full disclosure: these pictures were taken over the course of many weeks… two different batches of bread bowls I made. I tend to prefer the bread bowl less crisp on the outside (the bottom picture), so it’s nice to eat when I’m all finished with my creamy soup and then finish off the bread.

Yet more full disclosure: I also sometimes store my bread bowl, covered in the fridge, and reuse it for another bowl of soup the next day. (I do scrape the soup out well after the first use and wouldn’t, of course, serve it to anyone other than myself.) In that case, the crisper outside crust works a little better.

Also, btw, if I’m the only one in the house who wants soup in a bowl on any given week, I like to double my recipe, then divide my prepared dough so that I have about 1/4 of the dough to make a large bread bowl and the other 3/4 is perfect to make one long loaf of sourdough bread in this pan–which happens to be one of my absolute favorite things in my kitchen. To know the other favorite items in my farmhouse kitchen, check out my full list of what I couldn’t live without in my farmhouse kitchen.

I mention this to encourage you to start with this recipe and then adapt it to whatever works best for you.

What soups are perfect in a sourdough bread bowl?

While you could truly serve any soup in a sourdough bread bowl, I am partial to the rich, creamy soups that soak into the tangy bread and make for sheer deliciousness, like my super-easy Squash Soup. My favorite combination? Cheesy broccoli soup in sourdough.

Gosh, I’m hungry just thinking about it.

Why would anyone have two dutch ovens?

As a side note, if you noticed above that I casually mentioned I have 2 dutch ovens, you may have wondered why. It turns out…

wait for it… because not may people can claim this interesting fact…

A cast iron dutch oven was included in the purchase of our house!

You see, our old farmhouse, which we built around 1800, has an open-fire cook area in the kitchen.

(Don’t be too impressed… our old farmhouse came with a lot of headaches and crooked walls and floors too.)

So the previous owner decided to leave a few cast iron items–including the dutch oven which they left hanging in the fireplace–and the handmade tools they had created for using with the pizza oven.

When I’m not using my dutch oven for bread making, I love heating Maple Apple Cider over the fire in it. Or taco soup.

Come to think of it, the only soup recipe I’ve shared here on SoulyRested is my super-easy Squash Soup. I guess now that I have published these directions for making sourdough bread bowls, I should consider sharing some soup recipes,huh? I do share my Homemade Taco Seasoning recipe here.

Here are some other links that might interest you:

How to make sourdough starter & bread.

How to make sourdough pizza crust.

The secret to making the perfect (giant!) cookie.

Super-easy Squash Soup.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me will not hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst.” John 6:35.

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Sourdough and pizza…

Keeping busy and family meals…

These simple joys carry a lot of weight in our home.

This happens to be one of my favorite uses for my sourdough starter.

Today I’m sharing one of our favorite pizza dough recipes with you.

I’ll share another sourdough pizza crust recipe in the weeks ahead (deep dish sourdough pizza crust), as well as explain how to use your sourdough starter in any recipe you want to, in addition to making a few loaves of delicious, easier-than-you’d-think Homemade Sourdough Bread.

But today, a gray New England spring afternoon that feels nothing like spring should, I’m making one of our family’s favorite dinners.

The wind is howling outside, and cold rains are hitting our old window panes.

But the sap has stopped flowing in the maples, and our last bottled syrup of the year is lined up waiting to go to the root cellar, so I am assured one day spring will truly arrive.

This post contains affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.

A Big Sourdough Shout Out.

Before I share my recipe for Sourdough Pizza Crust, I need to give a huge shout-out to the book Sourdough: Recipes for Rustic Fermented Breads, Sweets, Savories, and More. It’s loaded with recipes using sourdough starter (nothing like stating the obvious, right?) as well as sprouted grains. It has been my inspiration for a lot of deliciousness while we’re stuck at home these long weeks, and the source for this pizza crust recipe adaptation.

As I was writing my book, Sweet Maple, I reorganized the layout many times. It was important to me that my book flow logically, yet also creatively. I can tell Sarah Owens went through a similar thought process with her gorgeous book, where she breaks down her kitchen creativity by seasons, letting her delicious recipes and the inviting photos be inspired by seasonal harvests.

A Note About the Dough.

When you add in your flour and start to mix it it doesn’t look much like dough at all. Once I’ve incorporated it as much as in the first picture below I will then knead it by hand. (Yep, the best pizza to eat is pretty messy to make.)

Also, as with any dough, I usually add my flour in gradually. Some days I want a little more than the recipe calls for and some days I need less. For this picture I had added exactly what the recipe calls for and I wound up wasting flour (left over in the blue bowl).

Sourdough Pizza Crust

On pizza day (which is Friday around these parts, as my Daddy would’ve said) make your dough in the morning. You’ll want to give it plenty of time to rise, maybe 8-10 hours.

• 1/4 cup sourdough starter (I explain how to make your own starter right here)
• 1 cup water
• 2 tsp oil (I use this avocado oil)
• 2 cup flour (go here if you’d like to know more about using fresh flour)
• a pinch of salt (I use this one)

1. To make your dough, combine the first 3 ingredients. Then add the flour and salt and mix until you have a nice, soft dough. (Take care to only add as much flour as needed. You may find you need a little less than 2 cups or you may need a little more than that. Add until your dough is a nice consistency and not too stick.)
2. Oil a large bowl (I love this refillable oil sprayer), roll your ball of dough in the oil to coat it, then cover the bowl with a thin towel and let it sit at room temperature until it’s double in size. (But also read #4 below.) Any old bowl is fine, but this one happens to be my favorite.
3. When you’re ready to make the pizza, preheat your cast iron pan to 550°. This is the cast iron pan I love to use for this pizza (it also makes an amazing giant cookie). But this would work wonderfully too. Yes, btw, I’m asking you to get the oven super hot. The heat makes the sourdough use the first crucial 10 minutes of baking to its full advantage, giving you lots of wonderful bubbles in your baked crust.
4. Place your ball of dough on parchment paper and gently press it out, from the center until it’s the right size, about 10-12 inches in diameter. Being gentle leads to an airy crust. Also, I don’t find cornmeal or flour necessary. If you would like, feel free to dust your parchment paper with cornmeal at this stage. (Sidenote: I’ve had this recipe not rise much and make one 12-inch pizza. I’ve also had it rise very well many times, in which case I divide it and it makes two pizzas.)
5. Add your pizza toppings. Sauce, bacon, and cheese are our favorites.
6. Then lift your dough, on the parchment paper, directly into your hot pan, keeping the pan and the oven as hot as you’re able. (The less heat that escapes, the airy and bubblier your crust will be.)
7. Bake for 10-15 minutes, being sure to turn your parchment paper 180° half way through. When your cheese is bubbly and your crust is a pretty golden color, delicious dinner is served.

If you’re interested in knowing what items I couldn’t live without in my farmhouse kitchen, you want to check out this list of my kitchen loves.

So there you have it… one of our favorite things to make on a perfect Friday night… whether we are stuck at home or not, this sourdough pizza crust brings everyone to the family table.

Other posts I think you’ll love…

The Secret to Delicious, Make-ahead Biscuits

My Favorite Cookies Ever

Sourdough Bread Bowls

French Toast, with a Delicious Twist

The have-to-have things I love the most in my farmhouse kitchen

This post contains affiliate links & I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Go here to read the full (ultra fun) legal disclosure about that.

My Favorite Products for This Recipe…

Click on any image to know more. –>

“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31

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Note from Michelle: Hey guys… I’m kinda shocked how little Facebook is sharing this post… even though it’s about the yummiest cookie known to man. (Okay, sure, I guess that could be an exaggeration… but it’s the yummiest thing I’ve made this week, for sure.) Or maybe I’m not shocked about the facebook thing, I’ve noticed they aren’t too crazy about homesteading-related issues. Readers have mentioned that they’re not seeing my content in their newsfeed lately.

Please consider subscribing to my FREE weekly encouragement so we can be sure to stay in touch. Just click here.

I try to avoid the bakery section of the local supermarket; you know the area? That place where the giant cookies are sold? And lots of other goodies that deceitfully look so all-natural, so just-baked-in-grandma’s kitchen yummy?

Nothing like Grandma’s kitchen

Fact is, there’s often nothing all-natural or genuinely the-way-grandma-made-it about the grocery store baked goods.

Those giant cookies that call my name if I steer my shopping cart in their direction? You’d think they were just made with regular old things like flour, butter, and sugar, right? But you’d be wrong. More likely high fructose corn syrup and imitation vanilla extract, just for starters.

That last one doesn’t sound so bad, I admit, until you think about how much better actual vanilla is for you over some that was synthesized in a science lab. In fact, if you actually google “how is imitation vanilla extract made” you may not ever buy it again.

I’ll make it myself, thank you

So, yes, I’d much rather make my giant cookie and know exactly what’s in it, thank you. And today I’m gonna share this crazy-yummy recipe with you. So you too can know exactly what’s in your cookie. And together we can join willpower forces and steer clear of the pseudo bakeries in our supermarket.

This cookie is so yummy, it even served as Hayley’s birthday cake. Well, one of her cakes. We celebrated double. Since we pulled off a big-barn-sweet-16-surprize party a few weeks after her birthday, the giant cookie served as her cake on her actual birthday. And, no, she had no idea another big shindig was in the works.

I shared the make-you-cry highlight moment when she realized even her best-friend-for-life was at the party over in my stories on instagram last week. If you didn’t see it, you can scroll through here. . . . if you like sweet, sappy moments caught on tape, it’s worth the click.

This post contains affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.

The cake we had for the barn shindig was big-time legit.

Thank you, my friend, Carole–you pulled off an amazing feat with that star-stopping camera-themed cake for my photographer extraordinaire.

My secret?

So, my secret? The secret that will possibly make this the best giant cookie you will ever eat? I mean, besides the fact that it’s not loaded with artificial flavorings or high fructose corn syrup? The secret is the most perfect all-natural sugar you will find anywhere. Yep, you guessed it, this amazing giant cookie is made with maple syrup. Mmmmmmmm.

If I didn’t make my own maple syrup, btw, and I seriously go through a lot of it for baking–and for making maple sugar (go here to know how to make your own maple sugar)– I’d purchase bulk sizes of syrup right here–snag the XXL size for the best price I’ve seen anywhere on maple syrup.

Wanna have a chat about why maple is so doggone wonderful? You’ll want to listen to this episode of my Simple Doesn’t Mean Easy podcast:

Don’t have syrup on hand and need to make this cookie now? I can relate, well, thankfully not to the not-having-maple-syrup issue, but to the gotta-have-that-chocolate-now issue… I gotcha covered. A recipe for this cookie without syrup is right here.

My giant pan?

My giant cast iron pan was a sweet find that I’ve used so many times for a perfect pizza. See my pizza crust recipe right here.

I love it that now I have another sweet use for this piece of cast iron wonderfulness, which is one of the many things I can’t imagine living without these days in my farmhouse kitchen. Want to see my list of the best items I recommend for any kitchen? That’s right here.

And we have mini cast iron skillets on hand at all times too, for those nights when we all want our own personal-size, warm-out-of-the-oven cookie. Topped with maple ice cream, of course. For these personal sized pans I dish out a large ball of dough right in the middle of each pan (about 3-4″ in diameter) and bake the pans at 350 for 12-15 minutes. Then I place each hot skillet on its own pottery plate, so no one gets burned. (Warning, these are big cookies. You might want to share.)

To make the extra-large cookie , you need the serving size below at 12 servings (and bake an extra 5-10 minutes).

For a 10 1/2″ skillet, set the serving size to 8.

But without further “pan”fare, on to the recipe…

Other Articles You’ll Love:

How to Make Maple Peanut Butter

How to 100% Maple Candy

How to Bake with Maple Syrup

The Tools I Insist on Having in my Farmhouse Kitchen

Follow my Maple Syrup pinterest board right here. Everything I ever write about maple gets added to that one board.

You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound. Psalm 4:7

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Glance at my Resource Page if you’d like to get a glimpse of other supplies I use for maple syrup making (as well as gardening, homeschooling, homesteading topics, nature journaling, and more).

Many readers often ask what camera I use to take the images you find here on SoulyRested. I love my Nikon; you can read more about my camera and even purchase your own here.

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Pretty-good-week fact #1? After unearthing an amazing light fixture last fall on our property’s centuries-old midden, I convinced my husband it should become our kitchen table light… and I LOVE it.

Pretty-good-week fact #2? After years of enjoying my dovetailed wooden box “magazine holder,” I inspected it closely the other day. I researched its markings, and I discovered that I was the proud owner of a box that housed nothing finer than . . . wait for it . . .

Original American Chocolate. With a capital “c,” because this company–the Walter Baker & Company–was established in 1780 as the premier producer of American chocolate.

I’m not sure if I’m more astounded that our founding fathers had the stamina to declare national independence without the fortitude that only chocolate can provide, or that I actually own a piece of this history.

Then, well, there’s the fact that I made the most beautifully delicious giant chocolate chip cookie EVER… keep reading for that one…

UPDATE: I’ve perfected a Maple Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe for Sweet Maple, which will be available in book stores across the country fall 2019. But some things are just too delicious to wait until Fall 2019, am I right? So I just added the maple-infused recipe to my subscriber library. Just subscribe right here and then you can hop over there to print it out for yourself.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Pretty-good-week fact #3? I stumbled upon this amazing online store that’s bursting at the seems with beautiful rustic pieces like my old light fixture and dovetailed wooden box. I spent a while under its spell, mesmerized by so much of what I saw. When I reached out to them with some questions, I was truly in love. They asked if I’d like to share their site with my readers. Ummmm, yeah! That was a no-brainer. I think you guys will love this stuff. Here’s where I am totally transparent, btw… the folks at Antique Farm House did offer me a tiny commission. So if you decide, like me, that you gotta have a few of their beautiful treasures, I will get a few pennies when you purchase, but of course it won’t cost you a penny more. And, needless to say, I wouldn’t even be telling you about their amazingness if I didn’t think they were, well, amazing.

Beautifully rustic and totally useful and practical products? They got ’em.

Top notch customer service? Check.

Great prices, and even unbeatable deals, on totally unique finds? Check.

Of course because these treasures are so unique, the inventory is continually changing. If you see something you like, trust me, if you don’t snag it, it’ll be gone tomorrow.

But here’s the reason I was so excited to find Antique Farm House this week: So often things I’ve shared on SoulyRested about unique pieces in our home (like my dove-tailed box, or my enamel pans/succulent planter–you can see them in the picture above or up close on this post) and rustic finds around our homestead (like my light, above, and these amazing old bottles). And whenever I share these finds with you, you guys are often reaching out to me asking where you can get something similar.

I hated never having an answer to that, since I dug my treasures out of my backyard midden or rescued them from my town’s give-and-take room. (Gosh I LOVE that room!) I can’t tell you how happy I am that I’ve found an online source for you all to unearth similar treasures for yourself! I mean, just look at these treasures pictured here! Then click the images below and peruse for yourself!

  V   V   V   V  V   V   V   V  V   V   V   V

V   V   V   V  V   V   V   V  V   V   V   V

Pretty-good-week fact #4? After the longest, coldest April I can remember, with the first day of May arrived our first it-really-feels-like-spring kinda day.

Pretty-good-week fact #5? A handful of furry, purring sweetness was born in the barn a few nights ago. I introduced those of you who follow my facebook page to the 6 adorable new barn cats in training on a live video this week. (I’ll stick the video down below too.)

You may not be surprised to know that cold weather makes homesteading extra hard, but you may be surprised at a few of our solutions that help us face the difficulties of winter here on the farm.

And glance at this post if you’d like to know about a huge mistake we made with our first barn cat. One we won’t be making with the new kitties, for sure.

Pretty-good-week fact #6? I baked a delicious cookie. Yep. One cookie.

But it’s quite possibly the best thing I ever bake in my cast iron pans. Yes, a giant chocolate chip cookie in cast iron is the most delicious part of this pretty good week. Keep scrolling for the gotta-have-this-one recipe.

Do you like to repurpose old treasures? Then you’llwanna snag a free copy of my instructional booklet, Give An Old Door New Life, for free, like right now… in my Resource Library.

And you won’t believe the fun stories behind these old jars and what I use them for today.

I usually use my 10 1/2″ griddle for this cookie, but I’ve also used my 14″ cast iron pizza pan to make one extra-large cookie, when I’m feeding a crowd.

I should say that my favorite cast iron cookies are the ones I bake in my 5″ individual-sized pans. But you don’t need a recipe for those. I simply use the Nestle Toll House recipe (on the bag) and place a giant ball (about 3 cookies worth of dough) on each pan. When I take them out of the oven, I place them on oven-safe pottery plates (so we don’t have to touch the hot pans while we devour the warm cookies), top them with ice cream, and of course always serve them with tall glasses of chilled milk.

If you like this recipe, be sure to try out another cast iron baking favorite of mine: Grandmom’s Blueberry Cake in Cast Iron.

So, to sum up . . .

Turning found treasures into a light source? A chore I allocated to my amazing husband.

Telling the story of my newly-found, long-ago-aquired chocolate box? A job I have taken on wholeheartedly.

Farmhouse Antiques for everyone, at 80% off wholesale? Something I just have to repeat again.

Barn kitties? A video you don’t wanna miss.

Baking cookies in cast iron pans? An effort I’m happy to devour. And don’t forget to subscribe here if you’d like to snag my Maple Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe in my subscriber library.

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These are the three sizes/styles of cast iron pans that I’ve found work best for baking cookies. And I’ve tried a LOT of cast iron pans, from heirloom to new, from tiny to huge, from griddles to skillets. I mean someone had to do the difficultly delicious research. You can trust me when I say these three styles/sizes of cast iron pans make the world’s best cookies:

Other cast iron products I love:

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The older I get, the more I bake, and the more I experiment with grandmom’s cast iron recipes, the more I’m realizing that the secret to amazing baking is simply going back to the way Grandmom baked. And boy, let me tell you, grandmom gave the perfect name to my favorite of all of her recipes: Melt-in-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake.

For me this week, part of going back to the way Grandmom baked included harvesting the fresh-picked blueberries myself. I was extra elated to spend my birthday morning doing just that.

Delay gratification

While there are a lot of things I love about living in New England, mountain hikes with majestic views and the rewards of wild blueberries is definitely on the top of my list. (This week’s hike overlooked a harbor of the beautiful Lake Winnipesauke. I wrote about Winnipesaukee, one of my favorite lakes, in this post.)

As I picked the tiny blue berries in the morning mountain breeze, I thought often of the delicious moist taste of the blueberry cake that I hadn’t had for almost a year. And I wondered how much of the secret to baked perfection is also in delayed gratification. That’s something we don’t know much about today when we buy a boxed cake on aisle 18 of the brightly lit grocery story–a box that proudly announces its contents are good for 4 more weeks because it’s loaded with unnatural ingredients and preservatives.

Savor the memories

Bent down among the tall, itchy grasses and short wild blueberry stalks, slowly adding one tiny berry after another to my pail, I was thankful that this cake was a long time in the making. I wondered how often previous generations associated food with one particular day and looked forward to that deliciousness for another 364 days.

The last time I had enjoyed Grandmom’s Blueberry Cake was on Mom’s birthday, last July. She loved the cake as much as I do, so we had made it for her numerous birthdays before. While I feel empty thinking about not being able to celebrate with either Mom or Dad again on this side of heaven, beautiful thoughts of Mom are one more sweet association I have with my favorite cake.

So as I feasted on the sun-warmed sweet berries, placing every third or fourth one that I picked in my pail for later, I decided that this year–today–I would make my own birthday cake. And it would be grandmom’s Melt-in-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake, mom’s favorite and my own.

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Enjoy the secrets

So maybe all three things add up to the secret to the perfect Blueberry Cake…

Harken back to the way Grandmom baked, consider baking your cake in a cast iron pan like this one.

Delay the gratification a little, and take time to make the deliciousness just right. Really cream the ingredients well, instead of plopping it together, and carefully coat the tender berries in flour before adding them to the batter.

Enjoy all the memories your family has associated with the cake through the years. Each memory makes it just a little sweeter.

Regardless of what the secrets are that lead to this deliciously amazing blueberry cake, I promise you, you’ll be glad you made it.

And after you enjoy this amazing Blueberry Cake in cast iron, you’ll want to try this cookie, which may wind up being the best thing you’ve ever baked in cast iron.

If you’d like to substitute maple syrup for sugar in any recipe, I gotcha covered.

Want general tips for baking with maple syrup in your recipes? Yep, I gotcha covered on that one too.

Want to own the book on a maple-infused kitchen? You might want a copy of my book, Sweet Maple.

Teach us to realize the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom. Psalm 90:12 

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For this recipe I love using my grandmom’s cast iron pan. Hers is an old, unusual size that I haven’t found anywhere. It’s labeled “10 5/8.” But a 10″ cast iron pan would work very well.

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The post The perfect melt-in-your-mouth blueberry cake baked in cast iron first appeared on Souly Rested.