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Tag Archives: dessert

I make! Random fruit cobbler edition

I just realized that I’ve never posted about fruit cobbler before.  This is weird because I do make a lot of cobbler because I often am trying to get rid of fruit.  Or I’ll find that my mother has stashed fruit into the freezer.  Or I’ll find that my mother was trying to corner the market on canned, sliced peaches.  There are other things you can do with random fruit, but I like cobblers because they’re quick and easy to throw together and there’s just something welcoming about a warm dessert (with ice cream).

So, recently I needed a dessert and the original intention was to make a lemon cake or lemon bars (stupid lemon tree).  Unfortunately, I didn’t manage my time well enough to make anything with all the lemons.  It wasn’t so much the bake time that was getting me as it was the prep and assemble time.  What do?  Look in the freezer and see what random fruit you have and throw a cobbler together.  Turns out, I had a pack of sweet cherries (pitted) and I used those to make a 9×9 cobbler.

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Since a cobbler is something I normally just throw together, I’m not always very precise with measurements.  But typically, my batter is 2-4 tbsp of butter that I melt in the baking dish in the oven while preheating (325degF).  I mix a cup of flour, 2 tsp of baking powder, 0.25 tsp salt, and 0.25-0.5 cup of granulated sugar together in a separate bowl.  To that, I add about 0.75 cup of milk (or if I’m feeling fancy, buttermilk) and 1 tsp of vanilla extract and mix into a smooth batter.

When the oven is preheated, I take the baking dish out and pour in the batter and whisk it around a little to incorporate the butter a little (small pools of butter are fine) and then dump the fruit right on top.  It’s probably around 2 cups worth of fruit normally.  If you’re using frozen, go directly from frozen.  If you’re using fresh, you’ll probably want to cut the fruit into bite size pieces.  Then you just throw everything in the oven for about an hour.  I don’t think I’ve ever had poor results with this method.

I’ve made cobblers with blueberries (fresh, frozen), random mixed berries (frozen), peaches (fresh, frozen, canned), mango (frozen), apples (fresh, frozen, although I typically prefer to make apple crisp or pie with fresh apples), and cherries (frozen, canned).  I may have tried it with other fruit too…but I don’t remember right now.

Sometimes I will double the batter because I have a lot of people say that the cake portion of the cobbler is their favorite part.  I actually like the fruit part, and I’ve been known to jam waaaay too much fruit into a cobbler.  You generally need to bake it longer if you stick in a lot of fruit as it would otherwise be too soggy.

Did I mention that cobbler is pretty good for breakfast?  Maybe with some plain or vanilla yogurt in place of the ice cream?

I make! A bunch of cookie dough edition

Sometimes I like to do things.  Sometimes I like to do things obsessively.  Like the time when I decided I wanted to make cookies and then made 192837912873 dozen.  Ok, so not really that many cookies.  And I often do make large batches of things, like cookies, but it’s normally because I received a request to provide cookies for a large group of people or something.  The other weekend, I made a lot of cookies for no other reason than I felt like making cookies.  So I made cookies.  I made a lot of cookies.  I made four different types of cookies.

The thing with making a lot of cookies is that you have to somehow get rid of a lot of cookies.  I didn’t have a large event in which to foist off all these cookies.  So I ended up making the cookie dough, baking only a portion of the cookies, and then portioning out the rest of the dough and freezing it.  That means I can have fresh baked cookies quickly now.  And I can do things like bake only six cookies because all I wanted was six cookies.  Of different types.

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Anyway, I ended up making peanut butter chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter chip cookies (partly because I just really like saying that), the coffee-cinnamon-fudge cookies, oatmeal pecan chocolate chip cookies, and oatmeal pecan cranberry cookies.  I’m only realizing now that I’ve never posted about the oatmeal related cookies before.  Which is strange.  As the oatmeal pecan (or walnut) cranberry cookies are probably the ones I’m requested to make the most.  I guess I’ll post about them some time.

I probably made 2-3 dozen of each type and froze the majority of the dough.  I like to pre-portion the cookie dough so you can just stick the balls (or discs, discs are better really) on a cookie sheet and put them straight into the oven.  I know some people roll them and slice (I used to) and some people just put a whole tub of dough in the freezer.  I think pre-portioning makes the most sense because a big reason for freezing the dough is so you can have cookies quickly at a later date.  If you freeze a tub of dough, you have to defrost it before doing anything with it.

I do recommend that you flatten the dough into discs before freezing so as to have quicker and even baking from frozen.  The peanut butter chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter chip cookie will puff more on the peanut butter side than on the chocolate side if you leave the dough as a frozen ball rather than a frozen disc.  Both sides will cook through, but you’ll have a lopsided cookie if that’s of concern to you.

Baking from frozen may require a few extra minutes at the normal oven temp.  Also, when freezing, lay the discs out in a single layer on a sheet pan or something and leave overnight.  The next morning you can gather all of the frozen discs into a Ziploc for storage and not worry about chipping away at a huge block of dough later.