The pears are going to be really good this year and I am itching for them to be ripe enough for salads and eating whole. In the meantime they are a litle hard but ideal for this pudding. Blackberries in abundance too after the hot summer: what better way to end the afternnon than brambling!
Ingredients
- 200g hard pears, sliced
- 200g blackberries
- 2 Tbsp honey
- 70g sugar, divided in two
- 70g unsalted butter, cool, cut into small pieces, plus more for greasing
- 70g plain flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- pinch salt
- 1 egg
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
-
Preheat the oven to 190°C.
- In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and half the sugar. Add the butter and mix until the dough is well blended. By hand, beat in the egg and vanilla until it is bearly holding together. The key is not overmixing; get it so that it’s just combined.
- Combine the pears, blackberries, honey, and the rest of the sugar in a bowl. Do this immediately before baking otherwise the pears will oxidise: not a good look.
- Put the fruit into a buttered oven dish (say 10 inch/25cm) and then dollop the top with spoonfuls of the dough. Do not spread out so that there is room for steam to escape from the fruit during cooking.
- Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until it is just starting to brown. It will smell amazing! Serve hot or at room temperature with raw double cream.
This recipe is based on one for blueberries by Mark Bittman. As he says, a cobbler is somewhere between a biscuit and a cake: fluffy, a bit flaky, buttery, and slightly sweet. It is quite low on sugar and very adaptable, as pretty much any fruit that you have around can be used. IMHO it is essentially perfect.
Sprucing the Goose 