Fresh Blueberry Cobbler for the Bakingly Challenged

A cozy home scene: Baked goods and skulls!

I once had a recipe for "mock cobbler" that rocked my damn world.  No idea where the hell it went, though.  Someday I'll find it again, maybe.

But this is a story about blueberries.  I am not a big blueberry fan, having eaten about 9 thousand tons of them one summer afternoon in my youth.  My older brother and I were afflicted with the worst attack of food poisoning that the planet had ever known.  Fortunately, our vomming urges seemed to be in perfect sync; first one of us would have to run to blow some blueberry chunks, and then a few minutes upon that kid's return, the other would begin to heave.  We gave one another reports on the color, amount, and consistency all afternoon until finally, the torturous barfing finally ended. 

But, I digress!  I recently came into about 3 pounds of blueberries that needed to be used up before going bad!  At first, my plan was to make a lovely pie or two, but bugs in the flour ruled out that option.  (Despite the bonus protein that the bugs provide, I've gotta draw the line somewhere.)  Here's a great recipe for blueberry cobbler that hopefully won't remind you of the above story.  I did find a box of bug-free Jiffy mix, so decided to make cobbler instead.  I divided the batch into two pie plates to make it seem more pie-y.  Why the hell not?

Hopefully, the recipe below won't remind you much of the Vomit-Fest story above.  If you visit me and I bake this for you, eat all you like -- I still have an aversion to blueberries!

INGREDIENTS:
3/4 cup of water
1 cup of flax milk
4 cups of blueberries
4 tablespoons of butter
3/4 cup of sugar
2 cups of Jiffy biscuit/baking mix
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of ginger

Here it is, all raw and yummy. No canned pie filling required.

 

 

DIRECTIONS:  This is super easy to make!  First, preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  Spray your cobbler dish (or use some pie plates like I did) and put your blueberries in the bottom, then sprinkle with spices.   In a separate bowl, mix the Jiffy, salt, and butter together until it's grainy and pea-like in consistency, then pour in the milk and continue to knead until the milk is thoroughly incorporated.  Crumble (or rip apart) the biscuit mixture, and then add dollops of it to the top of the berries.  Then, sprinkle the sugar over the biscuit blobs and berries.  Pour the cup of water over the whole thing, and pop into the oven for about 35 minutes.  (I turned my oven off and allowed the dishes to stay in there for a little while after.)

The recipe yielded a cobbler that was a bit runny, but still not bad.  The biscuit bits were surrounded with delicious berry syrup, and it wasn't too cinnamon-y for me.  Next time, I think I'll add my spices to the sugar, or at least sprinkle a little cinnamon on the top of the cobbler.  I may also mix the blobs and berries together next time, just to see if it makes a nicer variation in consistency.

Btw -- the original cobbler recipe can be found here on the Jiffy site.  I added my own twist to it, but the good news of it is that you can use pretty much any fruit that you've got, even mix it up, as long as you get to about 4 cups of fruit.  Pretty awesome, eh?

This dessert microwaves well the next day, too, by the way.

Pooping Rainbows

I've had some pictures for over a year, and decided to FINALLY post them onto PGS.  The inspiration for this project came from... well, I have no idea, actually.  But I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool to cut into a cake and have it be all rainbowy and stuff?"   And no, these ones aren't mine... these NEXT ones, with the cake all cracked and messed up... yeah, those are mine! ;)

Even though I came up with the idea on my own, it wasn't totally original. Turns out that others have also thought of baking a rainbow into a cake... and many pictures of rainbow cakes have been popping up all over online! I had originally planned to make my own cake from scratch, but after I baked it I thought, what the hell -- I'll use a mix next time. A bit of research has yielded the now (somewhat) famous rainbow cake thread over at Something Awful, as well as the how-to step-by-step guide over at Omnomicon. Apparently, all you really need to do is add a 12-ounce can of clear soda to a box of cake mix, bake according to instructions, and you're done! I did my cake the old-school way with eggs and oil, 'cause that's just how I roll. But next time, I'll give the soda trick a try. Someone also commented about using club soda and/or seltzer, which would be nice if you don't want your cake to taste like Sprite and/or 7up.  

Rainbow cake is renowned for its 
lash-growing & teeth-whitening abilities. 
 If you don't believe me, just ask this 
cake-tasting supermodel! :)

My cake didn't turn out so well (hence the "fail" label), but that's because my springform pans suck; I have to buy YET ANOTHER SET someday, so we'll see how that goes in due time. :)  The entire surface got a series of big ol' splits across the top, which I filled in with a shitload of chocolate icing.  I didn't get a picture of the finished product, or of the cake after it had been cut; the person to whom I'd gifted the cake failed to honor my requests for more images of it once it had been cut. So it was a big fail all around; maybe next time it'll work out better.  I have a few friends' birthdays coming up, so we'll see how that goes.

You show that rainbow cake who's
boss, Guy With Beard And Pretty Eyes!

I'm going to try the simpler method next time and let you know how it goes.  The other thought I had was, wouldn't this be a cool idea for holidays -- the 4th of July (red, white, & blue cake) and Halloween (orange, green, purple?) come to mind as fantastic ideas for this cake project.


I know that there are a lot of pictures in this particular entry, but I just had to show them to illustrate how totally cool this project is.  If you have never baked a rainbow cake, give it a try.  It's a fun surprise when you cut into the cake, and all of those colors are inside.  Very festive indeed!  Pics of the more successful rainbow cakes are courtesy of  Rev Dan Catt, Better Than Bacon, & Justgrimes.  Thanks everyone, for sharing your masterpieces! :)

Challah Back

Although carbs are awesome, I've never been big on just plain commercial grocery-store bread.  However, fresh yummy bread that's made from scratch is a wondrous thing.  I lack the patience to make it very often; once every few years is enough.  I hate having to wait all day for the darn thing to rise, then I worry about the cooking time in the oven... and then, of course is the thrill of cleaning up all the floury mess.  Yeah... just not my thing.

I have long suspected that I might just become awesome at baking bread if I'd just try it a little more often.  Rosh Hashanah seemed like the perfect time to make my all-time favorite type of bread: challah!  (Bagels [if they count] are a very close second, and croissants are third on the list.)  Challah is quite the endeavor, but the results are soooooo worth it!

Usually my way of cooking a new recipe is to scan it for things I want to change before actually attempting it.  This time, however, I Googled for a recipe that seemed to make the most sense to me, and -- miraculousy -- decided to follow it to the letter.  My pick was Maggie Glezer's honey-scented challah recipe, which looked and sounded absolutely decadent with its added smattering of honey to the dough.  The entire process, while arduous to me, was still such fun and yielded two little loaves of the most perfect challah one could ever desire.  And although it wasn't what I'd call easy, the recipe was straightforward enough that even a bread n00b like me wasn't able to screw it up!

Apparently, Maggie is somewhat notorious for her bread recipes 'round the internet, as I've seen several  other bakers reproducing the offerings from her book A Blessing of Bread: Recipes and Rituals, Memories and Mitzvahs as well.  Eli at The Fresh Loaf took some fantastic pictures of the fruits of his labor, and Sarah Kagan at Epicurious got some great tips from Maggie on how to ensure the best possible results.

I don't have permission to reprint the recipe here, but she has it over at Epicurious for those who are interested in trying it (and I highly recommend that you give it a whirl!).  I can, however, show you some of the pretty pictures that I took while Fuzzband and I worked on our challah.

We made our yeast slurry, then added the rest of our wet ingredients....

...mixed in the other dry ingredients...

...and turned it into a ball!

We covered the ball with some plastic grocery bags (a great way to reuse), and let it sit on the table for a couple of hours.  It doubled in size and started to smell awesome!

Then it was time to assemble my loaves.  I divided the dough ball into halves, and made 3 long skinny strands out of each half.  I braided them together...

... and set them up on my trusty old cookie sheet.  Then we covered them with our plastic bags, and left them on the table to proof.

And proof they did!  When we'd unwrapped them, they surprised us by being almost 3 times bigger than they were before!  Look how succulent and fat and yummy they are!  Fuzz brushed the outside with egg while I snapped an "action shot," then into the oven our challahs went!

Here's the stunning finished product, all shiny and gorgeous.  It smelled and tasted so amazing that we've decided to definitely make it again -- maybe next year, but perhaps even sooner.