Cobbler is another type of fruit pie. Rather than pastry, there is a scone-type mix on top.
Ingredients
fruit butter sugar self-raising flour an egg some milk |
Equipment
bowl knife peeler for fruit (if necessary) casserole |
oven:
time in oven: 30-60 mins (see description) preparation time: preparing fruit cooking fruit if required making cobbler top |
This is a minimal recipe. At the end, I suggest some additional or substitute ingredients.
A cobbler can be made with all sorts of fruit. Certainly apple, but rhubard is good, and plum is nice if you can face stoning the fruit (or dealing with stones while eating the cobbler). You can mix fruit - the photo shows apple and a few raspberries. Apple and blackberry is excellent. Some of the sourer fruits may need sugar added.
You can speed up the cooking by cooking the fruit on top of the stove in a saucepan until soft. The rest of the cooking can also vary. The cobbler topping cooks quite quickly - 30 minutes should do it. But as long as the fruit has enough juice, it can stay in the oven for a while. This is rather a slap-dash English recipe, where I am tempted to say "Cook until done, then leave it in the oven until needed!"
When I made this, the cobbler topping was too wet, and everything spread out to form a continuous topping. Nice to eat, but not quite the effect required! The top is supposed to look like the heels of shoes (hence the name "cobbler"). It could be that I had too much mix for this sized dish. You could use half the aamount, with an egg, and less (nor no) milk.
You must use self-raising flour (or plain flour with baking powder). This needs to rise!
Traditionally, no spice is used. But it does perk things up a bit! Try some spice with the fruit - perhaps cloves with the apple. Or you can put some spice in the cobbler topping, such as cinnamon or nutmeg.
You can eat it with cream, or ice cream, or custard. Or by itself. I have even eaten the left-overs, next day, cold, for breakfast...
This is an alternative topping for cobbler. I cooked the rhubarb with some sugar in a saucepan first (to make sure it was cooked properly). Then I cut 3 thick slices of bread, crusts cut off. In a bowl, I broke two eggs and mixed in some milk and a little sugar, then mixed it well with a fork. I cut up the bread and soaked it in this mix and put it on top of the rhubarb. The idea is similar to a bread and butter pudding, but if I'd put the bread on the rhubarb, and poured the mix over, it would have got mixed in with the rhubarb. Cooking time for bread and butter pudding rather than the cobbler recipe about.
© Jo Edkins 2022 -