“A man’s worth has its season, like fruit.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
As usual, my fridge is stuffed to the gills with an assortment of stone fruit. The weather is wonderful with the monsoons {rainy season in India} showing up, and a gentle breeze blowing through the house on most days. Two days ago, I was dog tired as the school vacations were still on, the kids had friends from Ukraine over for the day, but the weather was perfect for baking! So what did I have in the fridge? A bag of peaches, a box of cherries and some plums. Mangoes too, but those awaited a different fate because the kids love mangoes in their milkshake.
That bag of Linwoods Milled Flaxseed, Cocoa and Berries is still good to go for a few more guinea pig run, and this time it was headed for the clafoutis. I contemplated adding some additional cocoa powder or dark chocolate to deepen the flavours, but stopped. Wanted to get a feel of how it would taste as is. Also, took no chances and added a little cornflour to help set the custard., and added the beans scraped from a vanilla pod too. I dislike runny, eggy custard! While I was doing my silly experiments, the kids were running RIOT all over the place, the boys especially!
The skies had been overcast all morning. By noon, the rain came down. The girls stayed indoors, but not the boys. Boys will be boys, and decided a game of soccer was in order, and the only way to have fun was splash in dirty muddy puddles in the middle of the road. Nothing stopped them, and before we knew it, my exuberant fellow was splat out in the middle of the muddiest puddle of them all! SIGH… good thing I remembered to write down notes as I was adding ingredients to the clafoutis!
The verdict on the clafoutis was YUM YUM, and the fact that it had healthy milled flaxseeds made it even better! We all loved it, kids included. The daughter really enjoyed all the fruit juices that bubbled out through the edges. It wasn’t very light because of the addition of the flax-seeds. In addition, I used loads of fruit, so less batter went into each. The fruit got stewed in there, and delicious syrup rose up the sides once the custard was baked. With a little time on hand and a teeny bit of low fat cream in the fridge, I eyeballed ingredients and cooked up some kind of sauce to go with it. That turned out to be delicious too and very flavourful!
Clafoutis can be made as you like. Play around with ingredients, somewhat like pancake batter! Find what works for you. You can probably grind flax seeds and combine them with cocoa powder. Else use flour instead of the milled flax seed mix. Experiment – use fewer fruit if that’s what you prefer or maybe just a single variety. Some folk skip the cream and use whole milk, some 2 eggs, not 3. It’s a forgiving and infinitely adaptable dessert to make … am sure you’ll find what works for you! Next time, I might add some dark chocolate or more cocoa to the batter to make it more chocolaty.
Stone Fruit & Chocolate Clafoutis
3 peaches, stoned and diced
3 plums, stoned and diced
1cup sweet cherries, pitted and halved
1 sachet vanilla sugar, optional
3 eggs
200ml low fat cream {25% fat}
1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped
1/2 cup vanilla sugar {or regular granulated}
1/3 cup milled flaxseed, cocoa and berry mix from Linwoods
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp cornflour
Method:
Chocolate Cherry Cream Sauce
1 tbsp cherry brandy
2 tbsp cocoa powder
100ml low fat cream
2-3tbsps vanilla sugar
Method:
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