BUT, rather than spout out about what’s sucky and confusing (because nobody enjoys that, least of all myself), here’s a recipe from my weekend.
I love dessert. I do and it’s a shame because it shows. Jesse loves chocolate desserts best. I like chocolate fine (more than fine), but I like berries better. In a recent couch quiz, he admitted to liking my strawberry pie and the berry cobbler from Papa Haydn. "In fact", he said, "if you made it, I’d probably like anything." No, he’s not trying to be sweet (well, maybe just a little), my desserts are just always good. So I decided to try to copy it. It has been perhaps a year since we had this dessert at Papa Haydn, but I am confident when it comes to the mixmastery of berries and butter and flour. As best as I could recall, this cobbler is more like half cobbler, half crisp. The topping was dense and buttery and had oats in it. Here’s the recipe I made up and it was good.
THE BERRY COBBLER EXPERIMENT
Filling
3/4 cup blueberries, frozen OK
3/4 cup raspberries, frozen OK
3/4 cup strawberries, frozen OK
1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons corn starch
First, mix all the berries together in a bowl and microwave them til they’re mostly unfrozen (2 minutes?). Stir the sugar and corn starch together and then mix them into berries and microwave for a further 3 minutes or until it’s all bubbly in there. Stir it and put it in an 8x8” pan. Ok, next.
Topping
1/3 cup butter, soft and melty
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/3 cup flour
1/3 cup quick oats
salt
cinnamon
Mix this all together. I didn’t measure anything when I made it so I’m unsure of my proportions. It may need more flour. It should stick together pretty well, but not be wet. Like playdough! Pick some up in your hand and flatten it into a third inch thick pancake and lay it over the berries. Pick some more up and flatten it and fit it next to the other one. Lay the pieces close enough to the side and to each other that the berry goo can’t bubble up in great quantities. Put it together like a puzzle and hopefully you’ll have a bit of topping left after putting together your puzzle to sprinkle oddly over the top and fill in any gaps.
Cook it at 375 for ?. In my (very odd) oven it took about 10 minutes, but you’ll have check it now and then. I guess, uuuuhh, 20 minutes? It should be light toasty brown on top and the berries bubbling up through all those gaps you tried to fill.
Eat it warm with ice cream or whipped cream.
OK, I’m going to go find some lunch.