Archive for: Blackberry
The end of summer always means the end of shortcake season. In this case, by shortcakes, I mean biscuits or scone-like cakes that are topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit. Shortcakes are very easy to make entirely from scratch when you’re using biscuits as a base because the biscuits only take a few minutes to put together and can be used fresh out of the oven or made in advance and used at room temperature. For these shortcakes, I used a batch of my Buttermilk Cornmeal Biscuits, although other slightly sweeter biscuits would work equally well.
I opted to make these shortcakes with farmers’ market-fresh blackberries. They were sweet and juicy, but black berries can be a bit too big and firm to be a good shortcake fruit, and they don’t look quite as well sliced up as strawberries do. My solution was to cook them slightly to make them more tender, and add a little bit of extra sweetness by adding some sugar to them as they cooked. I served the blackberries over a big dollop of yogurt whipped cream – lightly sweetened whipped cream with some greek-style yogurt added in to make the cream thicker and even creamier. When they hit the dessert plates, the shortcakes were the perfect blend of biscuits, cream and berries – and it was hard to stop after just one shortcake!
I used fresh blackberries for these shortcakes, but you can also use frozen berries if that is what you have on hand. To use frozen, simply defrost your berries and drain them, reserving just 2-3 tbsp of juice, and add them to the saucepan instead of fresh berries, using the juice instead of the water listed in the recipe. From there, follow along with the regular instructions and serve the sweetened berries over the biscuits.
+Continue Reading
What kind of fruit do you put in cobblers? I tend to use apples and cherries a lot, but will try ti mix it up with different berries from time to time, depending on what’s in season or what frozen berries I have in my freezer that need to be used up. I usually turn to berries by default, but realistically you can put just about any kind of fruit in a cobbler and turning to some fruits that are slightly off the beaten path will make for a great change of pace.
I used a combination of mangos, blackberries and apples in this cobbler. The mangos give it a great tropical twist. If you’re starting with a really ripe, soft mango, it will bake down a lot while it is in the over, so don’t expect to have pieces of mango as firm as the slices of apple in the finished cobber (the apple is added to this cobbler to ensure that the filling has a good texture). Instead, that mango will just lend its juice to a flowery, sweet cobbler base.
The batter for this cobbler is cake-like and a little on the plain side. It isn’t anything special on its own, but it showcases the fruits well. To make sure it got a little flavor of its own, I added vanilla to it and also mixed it up in the same bowl that the fruits marinated in before they were put into the baking dish. This added a hint of fruitiness to the cobbler batter, and had the additional benefit of leaving me with fewer bowls to wash.
+Continue Reading
When you have fresh berries around, a clafoutis is a great way to showcase them. A clafoutis is a French dessert that is somewhere between a cake and a custard. It is just firm enough to slice easily, as cakes are, but it is based heavily in milk and egg, and has a lovely custard flavor and texture to it. The vanilla-scented batter is a great backdrop to all kinds of fruit. Pear Clafoutis is one of my favorite variations, but I’ve used blackberries for this batch.
Fresh blackberries go very well with the vanilla custard flavor of this dish. They’re bright and have a nice sweetness to them – and I have to admit that their beautiful purple color is offset very well by the pale clafoutis. You can use frozen berries, but your clafoutis will take a few minutes longer to bake and the berries might loose a little bit of their texture as the dish bakes. I think that fresh berries are your best bet, and you can easily mix in some blueberries or raspberries in this, too.
This clafoutis batter mixes up very easily in just one bowl (or in the food processor) in about 2 minutes. It has very simple ingredients, so as long as you have berries on hand, you can quite literally start putting this together on a moment’s notice. When you pull it out of the oven, you’ll notice that it rises like a souffle, thanks to the number of eggs in the batter. It will fall slightly as it cools, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t remain puffed up after it finishes cooking.
You can serve this dish warm or chilled, it is very tasty both ways. It can be made a day in advance, but it really looks and tastes its best within a day of making it, so I would try to make it the day you will be serving it if possible.
+Continue Reading
I have a lot of berries in my freezer, frozen when they were ripe and fresh this past summer (and some in bags from Trader Joe’s, too). Frozen berries work just as well in recipes as fresh berries, especially in breads and muffins where they’re stirred into batter individually. When you’re dealing with a lot of frozen berries, however, you sometimes need to make some adjustments to a recipe to get the same results that you would get with fresh berries. Namely, you might need to extend the baking/cooking time to take into account that the berries, when in a big bunch, will take longer to thaw out than individual berries. For a sauce, the berries can be thawed in advance if you like. For other baked goods, I don’t like to thaw the berries because they loose a lot of their texture and are much harder to work with.
This fruity Blackberry Raspberry Pie can be made with fresh berries or with frozen berries. With fresh berries, the pie doesn’t take long to bake and the filling starts to thicken up almost as soon as the pie gets in the oven. With frozen berries, the pie will need some additional baking time because the berries will first thaw before the filling thickens up. The end result is the same, frozen berries (for off-season pies) usually require a little more patience. The baking directions below give the times for working with fresh berries and frozen, so you can make this pie all year round. The trick is to watch the crust to take on an all-over dark golden color – that’s when you know the pie is perfectly cooked.
The berry filling of this pie has a lot of natural sweetness to it, accented with a bit of brown sugar. There is a hint of vanilla, thanks to the addition of vanilla extract in both the filling and the crust. The berries taste fresh and bright, and the filling is just thick enough to hold together well without becoming too thick or jammy. They almost melt in your mouth and really complement the flaky, crisp crust. It’s easy to eat two slices of this pie because it feels a lot lighter than, say, apple pie or something made with a heavier fruit. It’s good on its own, but excellent when slightly warmed and served with vanilla ice cream. Be sure to let the pie cool completely before slicing to ensure that the filling thickens up enough. If you want to serve it warm, pop each slice in the microwave for a few seconds before serving.
+Continue Reading
Sometimes I think of cobbler as pie for lazy people, as it delivers all the delicious flavor of a well-made fruit pie without requiring you to go to any of the trouble of making a full pie crust. Or at least, I tend to make them when I want something homey without the effort of doing a full pie from scratch. They’re definitely a favorite summer dessert because they make good use of fresh fruit – and you can use almost any kind of fruit in them.
There are many ways to make the topping for a cobbler, as it can be topped with a pastry (i.e. pie crust) layer, a cake layer or a biscuit layer. Cobblers never have a crumbly, sugary topping, as that type of topping is a characteristic of a “crisp” or “crumble,” rather than of a cobbler. I tend to make scone/biscuit-like toppings, blending the butter into the flour mixture for a somewhat flaky texture. I used this technique on my Blueberry and Nectarine Cobbler. This cobbler’s topping uses a standard creaming technique, resulting in a slightly more cake-like topping which soaked up the blackberry juices wonderfully.
I used my Baker’s Edge panto bake this, as you can see from the accompanying photos. The pan is great for bar cookies and other baked goods that need to be sliced up before serving because the design of the pan puts everything into a bar form to begin with. But it is also good for creating easy-to-serve pieces of other desserts, like this cobbler. It was very easy to use a spatula to scoop out each individual serving without having to fuss with getting the portion sizes right, which can be tricky to do with cobbler made in a traditional baking dish. That said, you can still easily make this in a 9×9″ or 9×13″ pan as long as you keep an eye on the cobbler as it cooks; it may take a few more or a few less minutes to finish cooking.
You can use fresh or frozen berries for this cobbler. Frozen have the advantage of being consistent and available year round, but fresh berries are hard to resist when they’re in season. Fresh will bake up slightly faster, so check the cobbler for doneness a few minutes early just to be on the safe side.
+Continue Reading
