Blueberry Streusel Cake with Chocolate-Orange Chips

It would be fair to say that my heart sank when I saw that Choclette, from Tin and Thyme (formerly Chocolate Log Blog), had picked blueberries as the added ingredient for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge. There are only a few fresh fruits that I think make good partners for chocolate, and blueberries isn't one of them! However, in the nick of time, I've come up with something that fits the brief and is much tastier than I expected!

I was unsure about whether I should look for a chocolate recipe to which I could add blueberries, or a blueberry recipe to which I could add chocolate, but after much recipe research I chose the latter. As many blueberry recipes contain an element of citrus, I decided to add orange flavoured milk chocolate to a blueberry coffee/streusel cake. I thought that the sweetness of milk chocolate would compliment the tartness of the blueberries better than plain chocolate, which can be bitter. What surprised me was how little orange-flavoured chocolate there is in the shops - in the end I had to buy a Terry's Chocolate Orange to get reasonably priced chocolate without added ingredients such as almonds.

This cake from King Arthur Flour is not a rich cake - only one egg and quite a small amount of butter - but it made a good carrier for the juicy blueberries and sweet chocolate. I left the cinnamon out of the streusel topping, and added 170g blueberries and 100g of coarsely chopped chocolate to the cake batter instead of 2 cups of blueberries. I also used light muscovado sugar in the streusel topping. In a round 23cm (9") tin, the cake took 55 minutes to cook.

The only downside to the cake is that the fruit and chocolate pieces both sank, which surprised me a little as it was quite a stiff cake batter. However, it was also a shallow cake, so everything sinking didn't spoil things too much - you can see in the top photo that the fruit and chocolate filed more than half the depth of the cake in places. As I said before, I enjoyed the flavour of the blueberries and orange-chocolate together much more than I expected, and the crispness of the streusel topping made a good contrast to the soft juicy fruit.

We Should Cocoa (rules here) is the brainchild of Choclette, who usually hosts alternate months of the challenge, with guest hosts filling in the gaps. The idea of the challenge is to use chocolate in some form, alongside an added ingredient chosen by the host.