Just cobble it together

Three days ago I bought some beautiful West Virginia peaches with the intention of making peach cobbler. Last night I started to make it, but some of the peaches had already rotted. They were firm two days earlier! It's amazing how quickly fresh fruit will go downhill.

Since I didn't have enough peaches, I supplemented the cobbler with frozen raspberries. I gave my husband the choice of peach/raspberry or peach/blueberry cobbler, and he chose apple. (Just like a husband to do that.) However, since they take a lot longer to bake than the peaches it wouldn't work (which is why I didn't offer it as a choice. Plus, the apples were all the way down in the basement fridge. Gosh I'm lazy.). I used his second choice, raspberries.

At right is what the peach/raspberry mixture looked like before going into the oven. Cook's Illustrated recommends macerating the peaches with sugar in a colander set over a bowl and reserving only some of the juice that drains out so it doesn't get too runny. They also recommend pre-baking the peaches, using the reserved juice mixed with cornstarch and lemon juice, until bubbly before adding the biscuit topping. I skipped the macerating step because I didn't have enough peaches to worry about extra liquid. I threw a generous handful of raspberries in with the peaches and added a little extra sugar to offset the tartness of the raspberries. When I attempted to gently sprinkle on a bit of cornstarch from my huge Sam's Club container, WHAM, a big blob fell out. That is what happens when you are in too much of a hurry to use a measuring spoon! If nothing else in this blog, I can serve as a bad example. I scraped out as much extra cornstarch as I could, but it was a very, very thick cobbler.

The peach/berry mixture went into a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes, until it bubbled on the edges. While the fruits were baking, I whizzed up the biscuit topping in the food processor. Normally I don't like a biscuit topping (I'm more of a crisp girl than a cobbler girl), but the CI recipe is really good. It's sweet with a little tang from plain yogurt. I daubed on the biscuit topping and sprinkled some turbinado sugar over the top for a nice sparkly touch.

One thing not in the CI recipe that I added was the sour cream base you see in the top photo. I mixed sour cream with just a bit of superfine sugar (because the cobbler was not very sweet - otherwise I would just use straight sour cream), and put a dollop of it in each bowl before topping with the warm cobbler. Yummm...