Gooey Blueberry Pie Cake

Today was a heckuva day. After spending the morning wrestling with difficult files at work, I was in quite a foul mood and decided to spend my lunch break in my happy place: the dollar store.

I love the dollar store. I do. Give me 20 bucks and 20 minutes and I can just wander up & down the aisles, looking at every new thing minutely. I mean, every week they have different inventory, and it's all just a dollar! Go ahead and try whatever you want; if it broke, or if it's gross, then hey, you're only out a buck.

And it's quite a cross-section of humanity you get there. I know Walmart is famous for its people but I think Dollar Tree has them beat. The lady in front of me in line was demanding that the manager of the store personally guarantee that each bag of buttermints hold 20 mints, "because the serving size says 4 mints and there are 5 servings in a bag so there have to be 20 mints in each bag because there are gonna be a hundred goodie bags and each goodie bag has to have the same amount of mints in 'em and I can't count 'em."

I wish I'd had the chutzpah to hand her a dollar bill and say "if it's that big of a deal, here, go grab another bag of mints."  I only thought of it hours later, anyway. In actuality I just stood there, making this face.

Besides off-brand baked beans and watered-down cleaning supplies, the local dollar store is a great supplier of storage food containers, which are just perfect if you want to bring your friends a fresh-baked treat but don't want to worry about getting your dish back. You know, something like pie or cake or blueberry pie cake. Mmmm, blueberry pie cake...

This recipe is a bit of a combination from my favorite baking blog and the recipe on the back of the can of pie filling. 'Cause it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ingredients

-Cake-
3 cups of flour
1½ teaspoons of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt
1 cup (or 2 sticks) of butter
1¾ cups of sugar
1/2 cup of brown sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
2 teaspoons of lemon extract
2 cans of blueberry pie filling

-Glaze-
1½ to 2 cups of powdered sugar
2 tablespoons of lemon or lime juice
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla

Like this, but without the seashells.

1) Preheat oven to 350º.
2) Line a 13"x5" casserole dish with aluminum foil (or two 8"x8"s, which is what I have).
3) Whisk together the flour, baking powder, & salt together in a large bowl.
4) In a different bowl, cream together the butter & sugar (brown & white sugar) until it looks kinda like moist beach sand.
5) Slowly add in your eggs to the butter/sugar, one at a time, beating & scraping the bowl after each addition.
6) Now fold in your vanilla and lemon extracts.
7) Slowly fold in your flour mixture, a little bit at a time, so you don't get flour all over your counters.
8) Next, take a 1 cup dry measuring cup and scoop out a heaping 1 cup scoop of batter.
9) Spread the rest of the batter into the bottom of your casserole dish.
10) Bake at 350º for 20-25 minutes, until the edges are set. This will get you a gooey cake. For less gooey, bake 30-35 minutes until golden brown.
11) Remove the pan(s) from the oven and spoon the pie filling over the top. I used one can for each 8x8 dish.
12) Take that extra 1 cup of batter that you reserved and drop it onto the blueberry filling with a teaspoon. Or your fingers. Whatever.
13) Bake for another 35. minutes until the batter on top is nice and gold.
14) Remove from the oven and let cool.
15) To make the glaze: whisk together the glaze ingredients until you get a nice syrupy liquid with no lumps. Use powdered sugar to thicken it, use lemon or lime juice to thin it. Pour the glaze over the top.

Now this is something that'll take that bleah cruddy day and turn it into happiness. The nice chewy cake base, just like my favorite sugar cookies, with the heavy sweet hit from blueberries, and the bright pop of citrus to pull it up. And yes, that these are very, very messy. The nice part is that you can just grab the whole thing out of the casserole dish via the aluminum foil, plop it in an off-label 'tupperware' container*, and give it to your best friend. Now it's her mess to deal with. Mwah ha ha haaaa!

*Are we the only family that calls all food storage containers "tupperware"? I mean, I haven't seen an actual Tupperware™ brand container in years, but that's all they'll ever be to us. I guess it's like Jello™.