Tag: cherries

Dark Chocolate Mousse, Peach Lime Cooler & Stone Fruit Salad … Summer!

“Anything is good if it’s made of chocolate.”
Jo Brand

Dark Chocolate Mousse with Balsamic Cherry Sauce My love for individual desserts in glasses knows no end, and I loved these glasses from Urban Dazzle the minute I saw them. Stunning and a million ways to use them, my first thought was dessert, maybe chocolate. Soon I proudly strutted Dark Chocolate Mousse with Balsamic Cherry Sauce in these beauties! They complimented each other beautifully … I think it was meant to be!Nice wine glasses said Mr PAB! Do you remember the Urban Dazzle goodies I received a while ago? I was lucky enough to get another lot of glassware to get creative with. This gorgeous set of glasses, goblet like, was something I’d never seen before, yet something I would instantly pick – pretty, versatile, stand out design, good quality glass, fabulous ridge and ever so attractive!I have a ‘thing’ for stem glass. I am also very skewed towards traditional glasses, crockery, cutlery etc. Modern design doesn’t normally catch my eye but these Alternato A.P tumblers were different. Functional and neat, appealing too, these are easily my favourite already. Despite being wine glasses, so much versatility!Thoughts flew through my head when I unpacked them {received them via courier, well packed indeed}. Tiger Shrimp Gamba like from the Leonardo day out at Olive recently! Ooh they would look great! Or a gazpacho … stunning red shining through?

I did a set of coolers as well, inspired too by the Luigi Bormioli Michelangelo Masterpiece Jug that was part of the parcel. Made a refreshing, full of flavour Peach Lime Cooler adapted from What Megan’s Making. I love the spout and the curves of the pitcher! The crystal clear glass shows off vibrant colours beautifully!Very artistic! It would look great on a picnic table with  a vibrant punch, ice tea, cooler, or sangria. A true masterpiece of Italian make, this belly pitcher from Luigi Bormiolo is a chic addition to any serving set or barware. I also did a Wild Indian Java Plum Juice with all its purple goodness, and Raw Mango Panna too. The latter neither beautiful nor vibrant to look at, packs a punch in summer! I have begun using natural raw sugar {khand / bura in India}, palm sugar {gur} or honey for my coolers.I went on to make a Stone Fruit Summer Salad which was as refreshing as can be. The dieting diva immediately declared that I must make some everyday … I could see myself peeling peaches, plums and mangoes till kingdom came!! The salad – peeled and cut peaches, plums and mangoes tossed in a sugar lime syrup {about 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 5-6 limes} and left to mature for half an hour …nice!The cherry on the cake was this Dark Chocolate Mousse with a Balsamic Cherry Topping that got made by default thanks to the power grid failure. My frozen cherries needed to get out of the freezer and be made into something! This was it!I had a cherry sorbet, pink and vibrant in mind for these glasses. But fate had other plans, and nothing frozen was going to happen in a while. My next best bet was dark chocolate which really pairs well with cherries. I used a similar mousse recipe from the Dark Chocolate Cherry Mousse Cake I made in June.

So tell me dear readers, what would you use these glasses for, other than wine of course! 

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Recipe: Dark Chocolate Chili Mousse

Summary: A smooth as silk dark chocolate mousse topped with a balsamic cherry sauce. Seductive make ahead dessert. {Serves 6}

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 45 minutes
Ingredients:

  • Dark chocolate mousse
    {adapted from the Thermomix cookbook}
  • 4 eggs, separated
  • Pinch of cream of tartar
  • 70gm powdered sugar, divided
  • 1/2 vanilla bean scraped
  • 1/2 t vanilla bean powder {or paste}
  • 1 tsp chocolate chili powder {0r 1/2-1/2tsp chili powder} optional
  • 50g unsalted butter
  • 40g low fat cream, room temperature
  • 170g dark chocolate, chopped
  • 200ml low fat cream, chilled, beaten to medium peaks
  • 5g {1t} gelatin powder dissolved in 1 1/2 tbsp of water
  • Balsamic Cherry Topping
  • 500g cherries, stoned {net weight}
  • 2-3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
  • 3-4 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1/2 vanilla bean shell from above

Method:

  1. Recipe is for the Thermomix. I reckon it can be adapted with the same proportions for regular top of the stove cooking, like a creme patisserie.
  2. Heat empty TM bowl for 2 minutes at 50C, speed 2.
    Insert Butterfly. Place egg whites in TM bowl with cream of tartar and beat for 4 minutes on speed 4 with MC off.
  3. Through hole in the lid, add half the sugar, 1 tsp at a time during the last minute. Set aside in a large bowl. remove butterfly.
  4. Without cleaning, place yolks, remaining sugar, vanilla bean powder and scraped seeds, butter, 40g cream and chocolate into TM bowl. Cook for 4 minutes at 70C on speed 3.
  5. Add a third of the beaten egg whites back into the bowl and stir for 10 seconds on reverse + speed 3. Add to the remaining whites.
  6. Fold everything gently together, including gelatin. Divide between glasses and chill for about an hour until slightly set.
  7. Balsamic Cherry Topping
  8. Place all ingredients in a non reactive pan and simmer for 3-5 minutes until the cherries soften and give up their juice. Make sure you don’t overcook the cherries, else they wont hold shape.
  9. Drain the cherries and reserve in a bowl. Return the syrup back to the pan and reduce until thick and syrupy. Pour back over the reserved cherries, cool and then chill. can be made a day or two ahead. It will thicken slightly in the fridge.

Recipe: Peach Lime Cooler

Summary: A great way to use up the bounty of summer fruit. Refreshing and ‘peachy’, this is a great summer cooler. Adapted from What Megan’s Making. Serves 6-8

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:

  • 500g peaches, peeled and chopped
  • 100g raw sugar {or honey; adjust according to sweetness of fruit}
  • 1 cup fresh lime juice (about 12 limes)
  • 5 cups water {or soda}

Method:

  1. In a sauce pan bring to a boil the peaches, sugar and water. Reduce heat, and simmer until the sugar is fully dissolved, about 10 minutes.
  2. Using an immersion blender (or a regular blender), puree the peach mixture until smooth. Pour through a strainer, and press through to get out all of the juice. Cool completely.
  3. Once cool, in a pitcher combine the peach mixture with the lemon juice, stir until well combined. Serve chilled over ice.

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Baking | Stone Fruit Crisps {Gluten Free} … Have a Happy 4th!

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
Albert Einstein

It’s been a summer of discontent here in North India, Gurgaon specifically as we’ve been subjected to the worse power cuts ever in a summer that’s been the worst in 33 years. The temperature touched 43-45C the whole of last week, and we went without power for 48 hours! It took a protest that blocked roads for hours to get heard. Meanwhile, everything in the fridge obviously threatened to spoil! One good thing … the stone fruit got perfectly ‘ripe for dessert’;  hence these Stone Fruit Crisps!

Crisps are wonderful light and easy to make desserts that celebrate seasonal fruit. They have a streusel like topping which is baked ‘crisp’ and gives way to soft cooked fruit below! Crisps usually have oats, butter and brown sugar … and mine went gluten free! I love fruit bakes and something as quick as this is amazing! 2 days sans oven was enough to drive the baker in me mad! Even if I didn’t have the energy to bake, just the thought of perishables spoiling got to me. Exhausted with extreme heat, I found myself cooking up most of the stuff in my freezer! So we had good food all the time, and coolers too! Did I forget to tell you that the summer vacation got extended due to high temperatures? Yes, that happened too, so no respite for Mama!

I made a delicious Chicken keema with baingan {mince with eggplant} … strange combination but its what I had on hand, and it came out finger licking good. Incidentally I made it twice on one day as it got polished off the first time around, and I had more mince in the freezer {and no electricity of course!}.

I made summer coolers, many summer cooler … a strawberry mango punch, aam ka panna {Indian mango cooler}, a bel cooler {wood apple cooler which was definitely prettier than tastier}, a watermelon cooler. Anything that threatened to expire was tirelessly salvaged! To kill myself further, I even took pictures!

Then came …… another jar of HOT red harissa and some very reduced fat KFC style burgers! Sometimes one can hardly believe all the work that gets done when there is no electricity!! {In case you are wondering, we don’t use electricity for the stove. We use a gas supplied through a cylinder … so that is is probably a good thing!}

Oh and I made a Quark & Cherry Verrines too … no bake stuff!!Then sometime yesterday we had power restored and the kids looked so relieved, as did the poor dog in a fur coat. She was the first to race for the air conditioner, and slept the whole day through! So did the teens. It’s uncanny to think that as kids we lived through this as an accepted normal situation! Not a whimper, no backup yet happy go luck! Anyway,  woke up this morning and my load of of stone fruit were ripe, ripe for dessert, so I set to work on something quick. While mixing the fruit I was curious to see if I could make the bake gluten free, so I tossed in some almond meal instead of plain flour to absorb the extra moisture. In the topping as well, I skipped the flour and added some almond meal. It’s always fascinating to see fruit crumbles and crisps bubble over the fruit juices! The crisp was delicious, bowl scraping good! Beautiful flavours!

Then I noticed that the colours of my little ceramic pots and bubbling juices were white, blue and red, so what better time to post this but now! Happy 4th of July to my readers from the US! Have a wonderful day.

Rustle up a crumble if you have 10 minutes, else stay cool and try this Summer Fruit Jelly that I created for Del Monte. You can find the recipe on their website here. It was fun and was made by my lad! Simple as can be yet stunning to look at, and delicious beyond expectation {if I may say so}!!

[print_this]Recipe: Stone Fruit Crisp

Summary: An easy, quick dessert baked with seasonal stone fruit. It’s quick to make and full of flavour… a summer classic with stone fruit which is gluten free too!

Prep Time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes
Ingredients:

  • Filling
  • 700g mixed stone fruit {6-8 peaches, 4-5 plums, handful of cherries, maybe two
  • Juice of 1 lime
  • 20g demerera sugar
  • 20g almond meal
  • 1 tbsp Kirsch {optional}
  • Crisp topping
  • 20g almond meal
  • 20g demerera sugar
  • 60g rolled oats
  • 60g unsalted butter, chilled, cubed

Method:

  1. Preheat the oven to 200C. Place 6 ramekins on a baking sheet.
  2. Filling
  3. Stone the peaches and plums, chop with skin and place in a big non reactive/glass bowl.
  4. Add the remaining ingredients and toss well to mix. Divide between 6 ramekins, pressing down gently to level out.
  5. Crisp Topping
  6. Place all ingredients in bowl and food processor and pulse briefly in short intervals until a breadcrumb like mix is achieved.
  7. Divide the topping between the ramekins to cover the surface. Gently press into place.
  8. Bake for 30 minutes until bubbly and golden brown on top. If the top begins to get too brown, tent with a sheet of aluminum foil.
  9. Serve warm or at room temperature. We are happy to have them chilled too!
  10. Note: For gluten free baking, please ensure the oats are from a gluten free source.

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Baking| Black Sesame Macarons with Cherry Chocolate Ganache … a guest post

“The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.”
Henry David Thoreau

Inspiration comes in strange ways. I’m racing with the wind, time is no longer my friend, the hands of the clock whiz by at a dizzy pace … and the pressure of baking macarons for our baby, MacTweets appears to be a lost case. Then uncannily enough I get a direct message on Twitter from Shulie, my sweet talented friend from Food Wanderings asking if I’d like to do a guest post for her on macarons. I want to say yes but I know I can’t manage it. I should say no … but predictably, I say, “Yes of course, sure!”How  ambitious of me! Didn’t realize that Shulie is doing a series on macarons on tree nut free macarons. Blimey! With the current humidity and high heat here in North India, where the monsoons are knocking on the door, I wonder what I was thinking. In good times, with perfect weather, I can barely find my feet with normal almond meal macs! Have you met Shulie @ Food Wanderings … an immensely talented and wonderful food blogger of Indian Jewish descent, born and raised in Israel, who now lives in the US. She is fun, has a wonderful style of writing and a knack of blogging the ‘right’ things {read the most delicious coffee ice cream recently posted}. She loves food photography and styling to the point of ‘silliness‘ and I begin to wonder if she’s another long lost twin!She promised to come down to India to buy pots and pans after I blogged about vintage pots & pans from my favourite little shop in New Delhi. It’s another passion we share … pots, pans, cookbooks, accessories, food culture. Shulie confesses to possess ‘many other food quirks’ and that gladdens my heart. She’s a lot like me! Mac time! I bravely peeped into my freezer to see what it held for me. Black sesame seeds. Should I? The devil may care attitude kicked in, and I threw a 1/4 cup of black sesame seeds into the Thermomix with 1/2 a  cup of sugar! Left the feet to fate …  time to think of pairings with fruit to fit the macarons into MacTweets. The theme this month – FRUIT, not a difficult task for fruit passionate me.Black sesame seed macarons sandwiched with fresh cherries in a dark chooclate ganache were the happy ending of my mac-adventure this time, colours inspired by the tea set I found in a night market in HKG last month.

Do head across to  Food Wanderings to catch the rest of the post & recipe.

Do you want to join us making MACARONS?

If you do, you are most welcome to join us  for the next challenge. You can find all the information at our dedicated macaron blog MacTweets. We generally post the round-up by the end of every month, following which a new challenge is posted!

This post featured in the Foodbuzz Top 9 on 5th July 2011 via @ foodwanderings.
“Today’s Top 9: July 05, 2011
The best of 2,261 posts from the Foodbuzz Community, as chosen by our editors and users. You’re looking at #3!”

Download the all new PAB iphone app –

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Stone Fruit Tea Cake … perfect inspiration for summer!

“No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.”
Erma Brombeck

A Stone Fruit Tea Cake must be one of the best ways to use stone fruit in a cake this summer. Light enough to be a snack to satiate that grumbling in the tummy, yet indulgent enough to offer a light summer dessert if served with whipped cream or ice cream! As I write this post, I am desperately trying to get organised as we are due to leave for a vacation to Hong Kong and Sydney tomorrow … and nothing seems to be moving!Ever since summer and stone fruit arrived, I’ve been looking out for options to use them differently. The Google gods are ready to oblige, and enter the magic words and soon I was led to Rima’s beautiful blog.  Her Stone Fruit Tea Cake caught my eye instantly. It was P R E T T Y, and looked like such an elegant tea cake.Back home my stash of stone fruit nudged me to get going. I seriously needed inspiration to begin as the day was dark and dreary, rainy gray, so no fun taking pictures outdoors! I got onto Twitter after absolute ages and boy was I glad to be back! No lack of inspiration there … a great bunch of folk, and a racing time-line sucked me into another world. Then came the nudge to move it …

dazzler2980: @vindee the mood to photograph doesnt always run parallel to the the weather.. SO you should just go for it.

Before I knew it, I was out with the camera and clicking. Thanks for the dazzling nudge Anita @ dazzler2980… The cake was baked soon after; was an absolute joy to make. The vibrant colours, the expectancy of a new bake, the uneventful release from the pan {very important happiness factor} all made it so worthwhile! I played around with the original recipe a little {which is now more the norm with me} to up the healthy factor some! It was healthy enough with all the fruit in there, but I put in some almond meal as I love the added texture and flavour it lends to bakes. It does make the cake crumb a little heavier as against using only plain flour, yet the end result is certainly delicious; well worth the healthy addition. As was the Gateau Aux Pommes {apple cake} I recently posted, this tea cake is another good example of a snack cake as well as dessert. Fruit bakes pair well with ice cream and low fat cream {my first preference}, and this cake is no exception. Go on, indulge!! We particularly liked the density and body the almond meal gave the cake, and the fruit were wonderful in here!This is a great cake for tea, served warm, but also nice to make ahead and chill. The dieting diva was back from Dubai and literally hacking LARGE slices off, devouring every crumb with pleasure! The cake kept well in the fridge for 3-4 days {covered}. I love this season … and have done a roasted plum and apricot quark panna cotta too, which hopefully will see the light of day {blog-day} sometime!The kids came back refreshed after a good holiday {away from the Mum}, and were spoilt silly by their cousin and her hub in Dubai. They are now back in the clutches of the ‘wicked mother‘ as we embark on phase 2 of the summer vacations headed Down Under {and HKG}. I am already TIRED, and the intimidations on the quote above are running fast & thick!

[print_this]Recipe: NAME

Summary: A Stone Fruit Tea Cake must be one of the best ways to use stone fruit in a cake this summer. Light enough to be a snack to satiate that grumbling in the tummy, yet indulgent enough to offer a light summer dessert if served with whipped cream or ice cream!

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes
Ingredients:

  • 1 tbsp butter (for greasing pan)
  • 1/2 cup almond meal {I ground whole almonds}
  • 1 cup plain flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • Pinch of salt
  • 110gms unsalted butter, room temperature
  • 125gm sugar powdered with 1/2 vanilla bean, sifted
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 sachet vanilla sugar for sprinkling over
  • 5 apricots, 5 plums, 3 peaches, 1 cup of cherries {or any combination of stone fruit you like}

Method:

  1. Preheat the oven to 170C. Grease a round 9″ tart tin with the tbsp of butter.
  2. Run the almond meal, flour, baking powder and salt briefly in a blender to mix
  3. Cream the butter and sugar for 3-4 minutes until light. Add the eggs and beat again.
  4. On low speed, add the flour mix in 3 goes and blend until just mixed. The dough will be soft. You can divide this into 2 and chill one half. Push the other half to line the base of your tart pan/ baking tin
  5. Pit and chop the stone fruit, and scatter evenly over the base lined with dough. Sprinkle generously with sugar if your fruit are sour.
  6. Dollop and roughly spread the remaining dough over the top, spreading roughly with an offset spatula. The dough will even out while baking, leaving pretty gaps for the fruit to peep out. Sprinkle over with vanilla sugar.
  7. Bake at 170C for about 30 minutes. The top will feel firm and set. Allow to cool for at least 30 minutes before removing from pan.

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Baking| Nutella & Fresh Cherries Chocolate Tart … May with Megan @ The Secret Recipe Club

‘Life is a bowl of cherries.’
Proverb

It’s May with Megan, my secret partner for the month @ The Secret Recipe Club, the brainchild of the very talented & sweet Amanda of Amanda’s Cookin’. The idea behind the club – Each month you are “assigned” a participating food blogger to make a recipe from. It’s a secret, so don’t tell them you are making something from their blog!I was thrilled to find my April Secret Challenge recipe picked by The Pioneer Woman in her post Web Deliciousness: Strawberries!

Ree was generous with her words. She said “Old Fashioned Eggless Chocolate Cake with Balsamic Strawberry Cream Filling by Passionate About Baking. This is the first time I’ve seen this food blog and the photos are just spectacular, not to mention the treats themselves. Wow.”, and then went on to add another of my posts in the round-up to say”Whipped Strawberry Curd Cream Tartlets with Walnut Shortbread Crust. My, oh my. I don’t know what to say.”

I love Megans blog Megans Cookin’ – Sweet, Savoury, Simple … goes the tagline. Her blog is delicious and we are addicted to her chocolate chip oatmeal snack bars; these are a weekly bake in our home. I have tried them in numerous avatars, with different flour substitutions like whole wheat and buckwheat {in addition to healthy oats in there}, and with different conserves, jams etc {homemade bitter orange marmalade, homemade strawberry vanilla bean conserve, blueberry conserve} …… with chocolate chips, with dark chocolate on top, without dark chocolate on top. They are THAT POPULAR at home and the kids love them! I had made a batch the morning I got a mail from Amanda telling me my secret partner was Megan. Could Amanda have guessed what I had just baked? I couldn’t post the same bars again as I have already done so on PAB. I hadn’t slathered them with dark chocolate this time because the weather is really hot, so I thought I’d use them some other way!Here’s what I did. I ran about 5-6 energy bars in my thermomix and got fine biscuit crumbs. My plan was to use them as a sweet tart base, with a cherry pie filling as cherries are in season here and very very tempting to use! Thought I’d do a bittersweet chocolate filling as in this Bittersweet Chocolate Marquise with Crème Chantilly & Balsamic Cherry Sauce I had recently made.That morning, an ardent local baker, the sweet Nidhi, messaged me literally begging me for a vegetarian something after she had drooled over the Bittersweet Chocolate Marquise. She’s allergic to eggs; I just had to oblige this lovely girl. {BTW, Nidhi, just finished reading the book you got me, and I loved it!}So the filling was rapidly reworked to accommodate Nidhi and her no egg request. You will not believe how delicious this turned out to be!! Finger-licking good, and well set too. Chocolate and cherries, like chocolate and strawberries, are a combination made to please the spirit!For folk with egg allergies or for a vegetarian version, I have an eggless tart recipe in this Whipped Strawberry Curd Cream Tartlets with Walnut Shortbread Crust. You could also use graham crackers or digestive biscuit crumbs.Take a look at the cross section. A filling that was smooth, luscious and sang the dark chocolate cherry song out loud! The diva on diet begged for more, and adamantly had two helpings despite being literally hit on the head and reminded of her diet! The son charmed his way to seconds! The base was full of chocolaty goodness too … a winner of a tart!This time I didn’t cook the cherries into a sauce. I barely simmered them in brown sugar and balsamic vinegar for 1-2 minutes, just to soften them and to help get them a glazed look, then fished them out of the sauce and cooked the syrup to a thick reduction. Oh, I added a dash of lime juice as well to give it a kick. Worked nicely!

 

 

[print_this]Recipe: Nutella & Cherry Chocolate Tart

Summary: A vegetarian filling /chocolate tart filled with deeply luscious dark couverture chocolate and nutella.

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes
Ingredients:

  • 1 sweet chocolate tart base, 9″ {recipe follows, or premade etc}
  • 500ml low fat cream, room temperature
  • 200gms dark chocolate {I used 55% couverture}
  • 2/3 cup Nutella
  • 2 tbsp cornflour
  • 100gms fresh cherries, pitted, halved

Method:

  1. Mix cornflour in 1/2 cup low fat cream.
  2. Place remaining cream, dark chocolate and Nutella in a heavy bottom pan, and simmer until the chocolate melts, stirring constantly.
  3. Add the remaining cream & cornflour mix and continue to stir until mixture thickens to a batter like texture, thicker than flowing custard.
  4. Cool for about 30 minutes. Sprinkle baked tart shell with the pitted and halved cherries. Pour the chocolate mixture over this, level out and chill for at least 3-4 hours, until set. Pour the balsamic cherry topping over, chill for another 30 minutes, remove from pan and serve.

Recipe: Chocolate Tart
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes
Ingredients:

  • 5-6 energy bars {recipe here}, powdered in processor
  • 50gms unsalted butter, melted

Method:

  1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Keep a 9″ round tart pan with a removable base ready.
  2. Mix the cookies crumbs and butter.
  3. Turn out into a 9″ tart pan and pat out evenly to cover the base and work into the sides. Mine was uneven on the sides, but the filling merged in later. {Also was not roll-able maybe because of the intense heat}
  4. Bake for about 30 minutes. Cool completely on rack. It will firm up when cool. Loosen the shell, and leave it in the tart pan.

Recipe: Balsamic Cherry Topping

Prep Time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 10 minutes
Ingredients:

  • 100gms fresh cherries, pitted
  • 50gms brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Method:

  1. Place all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer for a minute
  2. Remove the cherries to a bowl, and continue to cook the syrup until reduce and thick. Pour the syrup over the cherries, and cool completely.

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Cherry & Peach Oat Crumb Bars … stoned to comfort!

“One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There’s something about this season, and it’s certainly not the heat & dust which spells the North Indian summer. It’s the cherries, plums, peaches and apricots that make life oh-so-worthwhile! Stone fruit in season spells INSPIRATION!

Peaches are beginning to appear but are yet to reach their blushing best. The cherries on the other hand are juicy enough to paint the town red, pleasantly more sweeter than expected. I had 3 not so sweet peaches and a box of fabulous cherries on hand, and I headed for the bookmarked folder with Smitten Kitchen in mind. SK is a great place for fuss free and delicious comfort food; bars, cookies, cakes all celebrated at Deb’s beautiful place.

These Granola Bars from her blog are a favourite. This time I had peach shortbread in mind as the recipe sounded quite flexible. I contemplated sneaking in some more colour into them, and thus were born Cherry & Peach Oat Crumb Bars. 3 cups of flour sounded a bit more refined than what my comfort zone allows. I took a chance and substituted a cup of plain flour with rolled oats,  both basic kitchen pantry cabinet items, and always found in my larder.

Didn’t get a smooth, very crisp shortbread look like Debs, but the oats fitted in quite well. Do you like to bake with stone fruit? Whats your favourite? I love doing the crumbles, crisps and buckles, but often it isn’t enough to feed the blog, if you know what I mean. These bars are wonderful to make if you are on limited time. You can easily halve the recipe too. Do remember though that if you have a light porous stone in the kitchen, cherries will mark your space forever! Use vinyl tablecloths that are easy to wipe clean as pitting cherries is one of the messiest jobs, yet the rewards are the sweetest!

I wasn’t too sure what I would do with such a large number of crumb bars as I got carried away and made the whole recipe. Would they freeze well? Hmmm … with these thoughts I ran the squares past the kids when they came in from school, hungry as ever. Plain flour might have made these firmer; oats made them slightly chewy soft. The bars were loved … and are all gone!  I think this is a great way to use stone fruit in a bake. Fruit and oats offer a great make ahead snack for summer, served chilled out of the fridge! These also make an indulgent dessert served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream/whipped cream and a stone fruit compote. YUM!!

BTW, here’s an update on the kittens. They’re growing, are almost 2 weeks old and are getting quite adventurous! They’ve been gone since yesterday. Man Friday says that the mother will take them to seven different places before they learn to fend for themselves. Mumcat picks all three in her mouth, jumps over the wall and disappears! Then in a few days they are back again!!

[print_this]Recipe: Cherry & Peach Oat Crumb Bars

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 45 minutes
Ingredients:

  • 2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 cup vanilla sugar
  • 1 cup rolled oats
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/2 vanilla bean scraped
  • 200gms chilled butter, cubed
  • 1 large egg
  • 3-4 peaches, pitted and sliced
  • 100gms cherries, pitted and halved
  • 1 sachet vanilla sugar

Method:

  1. Preheat oven to 190C. Line a 9 X 13″ baking tin with baking parchment.
  2. Whisk the flour, sugar, oats, baking powder, baking soda and salt in the bowl of the blender to mix. {Thermomix Speed 5, 6 seconds}
  3. Add chilled butter, vanilla bean and egg and process until you have a breadcrumb like mix. {Thermomix Speed 10, 6 seconds, repeat}
  4. Turn out 2/3 of the crumb mix into the prepared tin and pat gently into place. Top with sliced peaches and pitted cherries. Sprinkle with vanilla sugar if using.
  5. Scatter the remaining 1/3 crumb mix over the fruit and bake for 30 minutes, until the top is light brown.
  6. Cool completely before cutting into squares. Store in an airtight box in the fridge.

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