Monday, July 9, 2007

What to do with 3 pounds of raspberries?

Fruit picking with a friend from home about a week ago left me with an unexpected dillemma. What can I do with 3 pounds of VERY ripe raspberries? After 4 or 5 days of eating them with every lunch, I still had over a pound left. The recipe search began. How can you use a pound of raspberries? I didn't want to waste my fresh beauties on a sauce, and I was never really one for raspberry jam, so what to do? I remembered that last year I found a recipe for blueberry buckle on the Washington Post's food site. Thus began the raspberry buckle.

After finding the aforementioned blueberry buckle recipe, I gathered my ingredients and started work on my raspberry version. I did exactly as the recipe calls for, with 2 minor switches. I used margarine instead of butter (all that was in the apartment), and raspberries instead of the blueberries. This is impressively "as per the recipe." I am one to make many a change, but this time I was pretty true to Kim's published version.

As this was the night the boy and I were to have dinner with a mutual friend, I made the batter at home and baked it at the friend's apartment. This became a problem as the cinnamon sugar butter topping melted in the mid-atlantic's July heat, resulting in an absolutely delicious, though less buckle-y cake.
The result was fabulous. The 3 of us devoured 3 large hunks straight out of the oven. It was superb. I planned to take the rest home for my mom and I to enjoy on this weekend's cartrip, but after 5 hours in a hot, bumpy trunk, I felt the buckle's remains would not be a good representation of how yummy it was, so we just tossed it. Very sad as it really was great. I reccomend this recipe for anyone with any berries that need to be used.
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Blueberry Buckle
Ingredients
Batter
¼ cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
½ cup sugar
1 large egg
¾ cup all-purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla (Not in original recipe, but spritzes up flavor of batter)
2 cups blueberries (1 pint)

Topping
½ cup sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, cold, cut into dice

Method:
Preheat oven to 350. Butter an 8-inch square baking dish.
In the bowl of a electric mixer, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and mix until combined.
In a small bowl, sift or whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Add dry ingredients to the batter, alternating with the milk, mixing until smooth and blended.
Scrape batter into prepared pan and spread with a rubber spatula so that it evenly covers the pan. Sprinkle berries over batter. To make topping, whisk together sugar, flour and cinnamon in a small bowl. Add butter and work with a fork or your fingers until mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle topping over blueberries. Bake for about 40 minutes, or until berries are bubbling and topping is golden brown.

1 comment:

Jess said...

That sounds oh so good! Hope you had a fun weekend!!!