Lemon Blueberry Cake with Lemon Cream Cheese Buttercream

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This lemon blueberry cake is so moist, delicious, and bursting with Springtime flavor! It features layers of zesty lemon cake dotted with beautiful blueberries, filled and frosted with lemon cream cheese buttercream. It’s the epitome of Spring in cake form and perfect for a brunch, birthday party, or a weekend bake. Look at how beautiful these cake layers turned out!

One Reader, Nanita, says: “The cake came out so fluffy and moist with the perfect amount of lemon and blueberries. It is a delicious recipe for Spring but I’m sure you can make it any time of the year!” ★★★★★

Contrary to my recipe for lemon cake with blueberry buttercream, this lemon blueberry cake has fresh berries baked right inside each layer. It’s light enough to be a brunch cake but delicious enough to be the centerpiece for Easter, Mother’s Day, an upcoming birthday, or any celebratory event. And while these flavors are typically associated with Spring, you could make this cake year round and no one would complain. I promise! 

Adding Blueberries to a Lemon Cake Recipe

I’ll be honest. I thought this lemon blueberry cake was going to be a breeze to test, especially since I already have a cranberry orange cake recipe that seemed like a great starting point. Turns out that blueberries are a LOT heavier than cranberries, so during the first test all of my blueberries sank to the bottom. It happened again with the second test, and then after doing some research I realized that since blueberries are so heavy, the lemon cake batter needed to be thicker and I needed to make two important changes:

1. Using all-purpose (or plain) flour is a must. I use cake flour in most of my cake recipes because it yields such a tender crumb, but after swapping the cake flour for all-purpose flour in this recipe and tweaking some of the other ingredients, the batter was much thicker yet still created the perfect texture in the baked cake. This thicker batter helps keep those blueberries suspended as they bake.
2. Cutting the blueberries in half. The size of blueberries varies so much, and at first I was nervous to cut the larger ones in half and fold them into the batter because I thought they’d leak. Turns out cutting blueberries in half, coating them in flour, and folding them into the batter yielded PERFECT suspension in the baking process and they don’t leak at all.

After making these two changes and tweaking some of the other ingredients, the result was the perfect lemon blueberry cake with amazing citrus flavor, a moist yet tender crumb, and the perfect suspension of blueberries in every slice!

Lemon Blueberry Cake Ingredients

This lemon cake recipe uses every part of a lemon to get the perfect citrus flavor. The zest is mixed together with the sugar to release essential oils + the juice is added to the milk to create buttermilk, which adds both moisture and flavor. Even though this cake uses all-purpose flour, which is heavier than cake flour and typically yields a denser cake, the other ingredients are tweaked to maintain a moist and tender crumb while perfectly supporting those blueberries! 

Here’s what you need to know about some of the key ingredients:

• Lemon zest + fresh squeezed lemon juice. As mentioned previously, this recipe uses every part of the lemon for flavoring this cake. The lemon zest is mixed with the sugar in the beginning of the recipe to release lemon essential oils from the beginning. Then, you’ll juice a few lemons into the milk to create a diy buttermilk that adds lots of moisture and flavor at the end of the recipe. In total, you’ll need 3-4 medium lemons.  
• All-purpose flour. After lots of testing, I realized that the batter for this cake needs to be thick enough to support the blueberries and keep them from sinking to the bottom of the cake pans during the baking process. All-purpose flour (or plain flour) is the best choice here. While I am normally a fan of cake flour for most of my recipes, don’t be tempted to substitute it in. 
• Whole Milk. In the beginning of the recipe, you’ll add lemon juice to the whole milk to create homemade buttermilk. This creates moisture and adds flavor to the cake. Since whole milk has a high amount of fat and protein, it’s the best choice for adding moisture while binding the ingredients together. The best substitutes here would be soy milk or full-fat buttermilk, but whole milk is my recommendation. 
• Granulated Sugar. This not only sweetens the cake but also tenderizes the crumb, creating a softer cake.
• Butter + Vegetable Oil. These are the two base fats I use in this recipe, a little bit of butter for a rich texture and a little bit of vegetable oil for added moisture. 
• Large Eggs. These add structure to the cake and help bind the ingredients together. 
• Fresh Blueberries. I recently discovered that using a paring knife to cut the blueberries in half is a game changer – they won’t sink at all! I don’t recommend substituting these with frozen blueberries since they have extra water content, and I also don’t recommend using freeze-dried blueberries. Those won’t have enough water content and end up having the texture of raisins once baked. Fresh blueberries are best!

Delicious & Stable Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

To fill and frost this cake, I decided to make a lemon cream cheese buttercream that makes this cake extra delicious! I tried a different method of mixing this time to make the cream cheese frosting extra stable without having to add extra powdered sugar or cornstarch. Basically instead of creaming the butter and cream cheese together before adding the powdered sugar, I switched up the order of ingredients to where I add the cream cheese last. It worked! And the lemon cream cheese frosting was so pleasant to work with and even pipe-able! 

If you want, you could sub the lemon juice in this frosting recipe to make regular cream cheese frosting and it would still taste delicious. Either way, the one key thing to note is that you must use brick-style full-fat cream cheese (not low-fat or the spreadable kind in tubs). If you can’t find that locally, I recommend using a different kind of frosting. Here are some suggestions:

• Lemon Buttercream
• Vanilla Buttercream
• Blueberry Buttercream
• Lavender Buttercream

How to Decorate a Lemon Blueberry Cake

I really love the way the lemon blueberry cake layers turned out and wanted to highlight them without making a full-on naked cake. So, after filling and stacking the cake layers, I used the lemon cream cheese buttercream to frost a semi-naked finish and let some of the blueberries underneath shine through. Then, I used the rest of the lemon cream cheese buttercream to pipe a braided border with Wilton Tip 4B. It’s basically a series of diagonal overlapping shells and it turned out so pretty! For garnishing the braided buttercream border, I added some fresh blueberries and little slivers of a lemon slice. 

You can decorate this lemon blueberry cake however you’d like and no matter how it turns out visually, it’s one of those cakes you’re going to want to dig into with a fork straight off the cake stand. I’m pretty obsessed with it and I hope you will be too! 

I hope you love this lemon blueberry cake recipe as much as I do! Let me know who you made it for in the comments below + be sure to tag @sugarandsparrowco on Instagram to show me. I love to see what you create!