3000 miles 'til dinner.

Original MIL Mission #41: Fabulous Berry Cobbler

Berry cobblers are definitely fabulous. You can make them fancy with all kinds of crumbly toppings or keep it simple, letting the fruit speak for itself. But either way… fabulous. And nothing says summer to me than cobbler, or pie for that matter, but it also reminds me of Fall. Remember warm cobbler with a scoop of ice cream on a cool Autumn night? Ahhhh, nice. Well, since September is just around the bend, cobbler sounds like just the perfect sweet as summer winds down.

♥HOW I MADE IT.♥ 

My fabulous ingredients. I opted to make a blueberry (which is my favorite of all the berries), raspberry (because they were just so reasonably priced… ‘tis the season!), and peach (because they just happened to be in my fridge) cobbler. Think that’s fruit overkill? I think not!

First thing I did was rinse the berries to make sure they were so clean and so fresh. How beautiful are those colors.

And then I peeled my peaches. I heard that you can make peeling a peach easier by blanching it. What’s that you say? What’s a blanch?

Well, blanching is a cooking process where you stick fruit/vegetables into a pot of boiling water, keep it there for a short period of time (depends on what you’re cooking), and then immediately put the cooked ingredients into an ice bath to stop the cooking process.

For peaches, blanching draws the skin away from the fruit so it’s easier to peel.

So, boil.

Ice bath.

Then peel! Peach peeling tutorial now done.

Moving on.

I put all the fruit into a large baking dish and squeezed some lime on them since I didn’t have any lemon. Figured that would be okay, but let’s see.

I then proceeded to combine the sugar and corn starch. And this, friends, is where I did the first of my mistakes. I accidentally put in 1 T of baking soda instead of the corn starch. Yikes! Luckily I realized this before I mixed the baking soda into the sugar. I tried to spoon the baking soda out, but it was too hard to get it all out. And I didn’t have enough sugar (note to self: make sure you have enough ingredients before you start baking!) to dump out this bowl and just pour a new one. So I did the best I could and then added the corn starch to the sugar. Again, we will just have to see…

I tossed my fruit with the sugar-corn starch-hopefully very minimal baking soda mixture.

And then popped in the oven for 20 minutes.

I then started on the dough part.

Ah, my trusty food processor. Flour, sugar, salt and baking powder all together now. Pulse in the butter and get to “pea sized”?

Then eggs, half and half and vanilla mixed.

And then all into a large bowl and mixed. I think this batter is looking A-OK. Phew!

Twenty minutes later, the fruit is starting to bubble on the edges so I think it’s ready.

I dropped spoonfuls of batter on top of the berry mixture, just like MIL said.

Then back into the oven again.

As I was cleaning up around the kitchen while the cobbler was baking, I realized that there was a bottle of ground cinnamon on the counter. Hmm… Argh!!  I forgot to sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar mixture on top of the cobbler before putting back in the oven! Oh no! It was too late to add the mixture as the cobbler was about to be done in about 5 minutes. Sigh…

♥MIL MISSION #41: ACCOMPLISHED.♥ 

So although my mission was fraught with little mistakes, none were too bad to destroy this cobbler. Yes, that is how fabulous cobbler is. When the cobbler was done, I did sprinkle a bit of cinnamon (no sugar, since remember… I ran out?) on top. Figured that couldn’t hurt.

We had a dinner guest over. After our wonderful meal, I served up the still warm cobbler with a scoop of ice cream. I was nervous because of all my little mistakes, but after taking a bite, I realized it was still delicious!!  YAY! The flavor was so yummy. But I do think there are a few things I wonder if I could do better next time. For one thing, the layer of fruit was more “thin” than I prefer. So that means either I shortchanged the amount of fruit or my baking dish was too big. On the other hand, the dough/crust layer was a bit thick, almost cake-like. So although delicious, I wondered if I had put too much baking soda so that the top crust was too thick. Bottom line: too little fruit, too much dough/crust.

But despite my nit-pickiness over my perfect cobbler, I thought the cobbler was super delicious. The hubby and guest had nothing but good things to say about it, AND they both went back for seconds.

And yes, it was great for breakfast too. =)

♥PLATE IT, ATE IT, GRADED IT.♥

scale: 0 (not at all) to 5 (very)

Cupboard to table time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

Difficulty: 1

Deliciousness: 4.5 (to save room for some improvement!)

Impressed Husband (and friend) factor: 5 (They loved it!)

Leftover-friendly: 5