Look, I like the idea of a blueberry muffin as much as the next red-blooded American woman.

Sweet, soft, imminently portable, with a little bit of a tangy burst in each bite. What’s not to love?

Making them. That’s what.

By the time I’ve made a batter and poured it into individual muffin cups, I am in no mood to make a second round of batter, this one crumbly, to create a streusel topping.

Individual cups plus a second batter is where I draw the line, evidently.

Plus, I always seem to dry out muffins. Do you do that? There seems to be too much crusty outside for the amount of soft inside.

And yet. Here are these beautiful blueberry bushes in our backyard.

We have been dutifully picking blueberries for weeks now, and most of them have ended up in the freezer.

(Pro tip: never wash your blueberries before you freeze them. That little white film on a blueberry actually helps protect it. Just wash them before you eat or bake with them.)

I’ve been mixing a handful of berries into a bowl of lemon yogurt and topping the whole shebang with a generous sprinkle of granola for breakfast, but there are only so many berries one can eat at the rate of a quarter cup daily.

Thankfully, I remembered this recipe my friend Karen shared with me many years ago.

She called it blueberry kuchen. She got it from her German grandmother.

Julia just finished German I this year and tells me that kuchen is just cake in German.

So, basically… it’s blueberry cake. That’s what I have for you here today.

Except it’s much more like a coffee or breakfast cake than any dessert cake I’ve had here in the U.S. I’d compare it to a muffin with a streusel topping, actually.

See what she did there? She gave me a recipe for one giant streusel-topped muffin.

It doesn’t dry out so easily, but it still has the tanginess and portability of a muffin. Win-win.

Plus it uses something we grew, so for me it’s win-win-win. You don’t see that every day.

KAREN T.’S BLUEBERRY KUCHEN

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

Topping (don’t skip it):
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup butter, melted

Directions
■ Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-by-13-inch cake pan. In a mixing bowl, combine first six ingredients (1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup sugar, baking powder, lemon zest, nutmeg, salt). Add the next four ingredients (milk, 1/4 cup butter, egg, and vanilla). Beat until well blended. Pour batter into the prepared pan. Sprinkle evenly with berries.
■ To make topping, combine 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and 1/4 cup melted butter in a mixing bowl. (I used the same one I mixed the first batter in because I am a wild woman like that.) Mix topping ingredients with a fork or rubber spatula until it resembles wet sand. Sprinkle mixture evenly over blueberries. Bake mixture at 350 for about 40 minutes, until lightly browned.

Amelia Plair is a mom and high school teacher in Starkville. Email reaches her at [email protected].

Amelia Plair is a Starkville resident who writes occasional food columns.