Music and Cats

A couple of weeks ago, Viv at Seattle Bon Vivant announced this month’s Is My Blog Burning? with the following:

… I had a few ideas for my theme: Tutti Frutti was one. This idea involved just dishing out anything that involved fruits, any fruit. The second option was something that reflected my own philosophies about food. Slow Food would be the theme. Cooking or baking with locally sourced ingredients or artisanal products–whether meats, cheeses, wines, etc–from any country or region in the world

This option was geared towards promoting one of my passions, Farmers Markets, by encouraging other bloggers to visit their local markets and come up with an entry that utilized any product of combination of products purchased from a local farmer or that could be found at a neighborhood farmers market.

The third option was Eggs. I could not make up my mind about my theme but I knew I had plenty of time to decide between these three options.

In the end, Viv chose Eggs as the theme, but I thought Why not all three?

What to do with a triple theme of eggs, fruit and local products? Make clafouti, of course! This eggy French dessert studded with cherries seemed like just the thing. While I’d heard of clafouti, I had never before tasted or baked one. However, I love baked pancakes, and clafouti seemed like the same sort of custard/pancake hybrid. It’s the height of cherry season in Washington, and I’m making regular stops at the Alberg Farm truck to buy luscious Lamberts and, this weekend, burgundy-black Bings. These cherries, from a farm just the other side of the Cascades, had been off the tree fewer than 2 days when they went into my oven. (Eggs are sold at Seattle Farmers’ Markets, but I didn’t buy mine from a local farmer. I do buy Washington eggs, from uncaged hens fed hormone-free, vegetarian feed, but that’s all that I can tell you about them.)

This recipe is a variant on Julia Child’s clafouti recipe, found at Chowhound. I contemplated the traditional French method, in which the cherries are not pitted before baking into the clafouti, but I decided that the inconvenience while eating wasn’t worth any slight improvement in flavor or appearance.

Cherry Clafouti

3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons almond extract
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 cups pitted sweet cherries
butter (for baking dish)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly butter a 3-4 cup shallow baking dish (or a couple of smaller dishes).

Place first five ingredients in a blender. Cover and blend at top speed for 1 minute. Pour about half of the batter into the buttered baking dish(es). Spread the cherries over the batter. Pour the rest of the batter on top of the cherries, and shake dish gently to level.

Place clafouti on the middle rack of the preheated oven. Bake for 50-55 minutes. When done, the clafouti will be puffy and lightly browned, and a knife inserted into the center will come out clean. Serve warm.

If you read the recipe at Chowhound, you’ll see that I dropped a step or two. I reduced the amount of sugar by half, as these perfect cherries had no need of additional sugar. That recipe called for vanilla extract; I’m embarassed to say I’d run out, but I love the flavors of cherry and almond together.

The clafouti was much like a baked pancake, but better - an almond-flavored, slightly sweet, custardy matrix surrounding sweet, still-firm cherries. Our dinner guest, who has had clafoutis in France, deemed it perfect… and was very pleased that I’d pitted the cherries.

UPDATE: Since my first clafouti was such a hit, and it’s still cherry season here, and we’ve had friends over, I’ve made two more clafoutis in the past couple of weeks. I’ve made slight recipe adjustments each time; here’s the most recent (and my favorite) ingredient list:

1 1/4 cup milk
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 tablespoon almond extract
2/3 cup ap flour
2 1/2 cups pitted sweet cherries (or 1 1/2 cups cherries + 1 cup blueberries, or…)
butter (for baking dish)

With the gorgeous sweet cherries that we’ve been getting, there’s no need for additional sweeteners; I may omit the sugar altogether the next time that I bake this. And yes, the amounts are scaled up by about a third; the recipe I used the first time just didn’t make quite enough of this yummy treat. This recipe nicely fills my 4-cup baking dish, and will make 4-6 people very happy.

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