thoughtful consumption

For a few weeks, I made peach muffins with the beautiful peaches from my CSA share. (Chris and I aren’t big fans of the fresh peach.) But then I started getting a hankering for cobbler. I wanted to combine the convenience of muffins with the yumminess of cobbler. After browsing through some recipes, I didn’t see any reason one couldn’t make muffin-sized mini-cobblers. This week, I finally did it.

I started by defrosting some chopped peaches and plums from last month. I also had to defrost two egg whites and an egg yolk because I was out of fresh eggs. (Having eggs in the freezer is handy.)

I followed the recipe for blueberry cobbler from How To Cook Everything. Except I used half the amount of fruit (2-3 cups), I didn’t sugar the fruit first, and I used a muffin tin instead of an 8-inch square baking pan. But the dough recipe was the same. I think this recipe is pretty forgiving, and you could play around with the ratio of dough to fruit and see what’s best.

I drained the defrosted peaches/plums and put them in a muffin tin.

(Draining the fruit left a couple of cups of fruit juice.

I added some brandy, vanilla, and sugar and cooked it into a syrup for later.)

Then I made the dough in a food processor according to Bittman’s directions.

First, I combined

• ½ cup flour
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt

by adding them to the processor and pulsing a couple of times.

Next, I diced a stick of butter, added the cubelets to the dry ingredients, and blended for 10 seconds. (That’s a 1:1 ratio of butter to flour for those keeping score. No wonder cobbler is delicious.)

Then, I beat in an egg and ½ teaspoon of vanilla. (Okay, so it was actually a whole teaspoon.)

The yellow bits aren’t peach parts; they’re yolk bits. Defrosting the egg whites and yolk worked fine for this recipe, but the yolk never returned to a soft state. I had to chop at it to get it to blend.

Finally, I spooned about 2 teaspoons of dough into each muffin tin.

You don’t need to spread it around because the butter will melt and do it for you.

Using a muffin tin shortened the baking time. These guys only needed 20 minutes at 375 degrees.

They looked and smelled wonderful, but they were a little unwieldy. I came up with three options for eating a mini-cobbler:

Flip it over and eat it as a sweet biscuit topped with yummy fruitness. This is especially good for quick breakfasts and afternoon snacks.

Use a spoon and a bowl. More stately, less fun.

Top with vanilla ice cream and peach brandy sauce.

Okay, so that was the cute little Bon Appétit photo. Here’s what I really ate…