Every family has a few recipes that survive the years by becoming something slightly different each time.
This one came home from a recipe exchange — shared by Rabbi Debi Wechsler. We made it as muffins the first time. Then, as a breakfast cake. Then with chocolate chips instead of blueberries, then with other fruit, then back to blueberries again. Every version has worked. That kind of recipe is rare.
For families with children at the Passover table, a breakfast cake that comes together quickly and travels well is genuinely useful. Passover mornings — especially during the middle days of chol hamoed — can feel unmoored without the usual bread and cereal anchors. Having something to bake the night before, something the kids can help pour batter for, restores a small sense of normalcy to the morning routine.
This is that recipe.
Passover Mornings and the Rhythm of the Week
Passover does something interesting to family routine. The holiday removes so many of the automatic choices — the usual breakfast, the packed lunch, the after-school snack — and replaces them with constraints that require more thought than most families have bandwidth for in the middle of a busy week.
What many families discover is that the most stressful part of Passover isn’t the Seder. It’s the days after. The Seder has a structure built in. The rest of the week doesn’t.
Having a few reliable recipes — things that are easy, that the kids will actually eat, that can be made in advance — is one of the simplest ways to hold the week together. This muffin-and-cake recipe is one of those. It takes less than an hour, it works with whatever fruit you have, and it freezes well if you want to make it before the holiday begins.
Ingredients
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil
1/3 cup cake meal
3 eggs
1/4 cup potato starch
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup frozen blueberries (works with other fruit or chocolate chips)
Cinnamon & Sugar
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
- Mix oil and sugar together until somewhat creamy.
- Add eggs and beat well.
- In a separate bowl, mix together all dry ingredients.
- Carefully fold dry ingredients into wet ingredients.
- Fold in the frozen blueberries.
- Place in a lined muffin tin or pour the batter into a greased 9×13 aluminum pan.
- Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar.
- Bake 45 minutes. The cake version may need slightly longer to finish baking.
- Cool in pan and run a knife around edges to loosen.
More from the Passover Table
If you’re planning your Passover week, the chocolate cake recipe on this site has become a reader favorite for the Seder table itself — rich, moist, and genuinely not what people expect from a Passover dessert. And if you’re thinking about how to keep children engaged through the Seder and the week that follows, this post on why the Seder is designed around children is worth reading before the holiday.
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