This year's wild blackberries recipe
I love the end of summer. I don't love that the summer is ending but I wished that the end of summer time would last forever. Just as I wished that mornings would last the whole day. Weird metaphysical wishes, I know.
Anyway, blackberries are everywhere and this year in particular I've been finding the biggest and juiciest ones. They're great on their own or with some other summer fruits like peaches and raspberries, which is normally what I have for breakfast, sprinkled with flax meal or drizzled with this.
Today I chose something more substancial and had them folded in a Dutch baby pancake. Hmmm pancake, yum... but what exactly is a Dutch baby pancake?, you might ask. First of all it has nothing to do with the Dutch or their little Poffertjes. According to Wikipedia, although German inspired this kind of pancake was baptised as Dutch baby pancake in a restaurant in Seattle, Washington (deutsch, dutch, honest mistake, I'm from Europe and had this confrontation in my mind at least once or twice). I had an English grandmother so I grew up eating Yorkshire pudding and to me a Dutch baby pancake is like a sweet version of a Yorkshire pudding baked in a cast iron skillet. To put it simply: it's a puffed crepe.
For the recipe, I turned to one of my favourite books of all time, Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life and made a few adaptations to her Dutch baby pancake recipe, switching all-purpose flour to a blend of rice flour and tapioca starch, using coconut oil instead of butter (next time I'll try it with ghee!) and replacing half-and-half for almond milk, and thus turning the recipe gluten and lactose free. Nothing against the original ingredients, so please feel free to use them in the same quantities stated in the recipe if you prefer.
Dutch baby pancake with sautéed wild blackberries
For the pancake:
1 tbsp coconut oil
2 eggs, organic preferably
3 tbsp rice flour
1 tbsp tapioca starch
1/4 cup almond milk
Pinch of salt
For the blackberries:
1/2 tsp coconut oil
1/4 cup blackberries
1 tsp maple syrup
1 squeeze of lemon juice
To serve (optional):
a sprinkle of dessicated coconut flakes
Preheat the oven to 220ºC. Put the coconut oil in a cast iron skillet and place it in the oven to melt. In a hand-blender beaker put the eggs, flour, starch, milk and salt. Blend well and pour into the warmed skillet. Place the skillet in the oven and bake for 18-20 minutes. The mixture will rise and puff, mostly in the edges. In the meantime, heat the coconut oil in a small pan. Add the blackberries, maple and lemon juice and sautée for a few minutes until warm. When the pancake is ready remove it from the oven and pour the sautéed fruit on top of it. Sprinkle with the coconut flakes and serve immediatly.
Makes 1