Saturday, July 24, 2010

Cobbled Together

Traditionally, a cobbler is a shoemaker and sole-repairman, with, I like to imagine, a brown leather apron and a pair of glasses sitting just so on the edge of his nose.

My kind of cobbler, the fruit kind, fixes things too. It fixes the fact that you haven’t had much of a life for a few months straight. It fixes the fact you haven’t seen your family since Christmas. It fixes all the stress by relaxing you with the lovely job of pitting stone fruits, squeezing a lemon, and mixing together a crumbly topping. My kind of a cobbler is the soul-repairman, summer-fruit version.

From The Vagabond Table


For my mom’s birthday, I gave her David Lebovitz’s delicious book, Ready for Dessert, a book that offers everything from pies and cakes to tarts and ice creams. For the past month or so we’ve discussed baking one of his recipes together, and upon my return home, we decided on the Cherry-Almond Cobbler, a relatively simple and delicious-sounding dessert that we chose to serve at a brunch later in the weekend.

You pit a pound of cherries (luckily my mom had a cherry-pitter. Unluckily, I suck at using it and she had to go back through and remove all the seeds that I missed.) You mix sugar and lemon juice with the cherries (with your cherry-juice stained arms), then mix a simple topping of flour, marzipan, butter, milk, and sugar until fluffy and spoon over the cherries. The dish smells heavenly when baking, toasted and almond-y with a ripe layer of summer fruit at its peak.

From The Vagabond Table


This Cherry-Almond Cobbler is easy to assemble, and just as easy to disassemble, as noted by my lack of any photos of an actual serving of it. The whole dish was gone within twenty minutes, so I know I'm not the only one who loves summer-fruit cobblers! The almond topping complimented the cherries perfectly, and really, such a dessert is the only reason you should even turn your oven on in these swelteringly hot days of summer.

From The Vagabond Table


Guys, this cobbler was a hit. And, like I mentioned earlier, it tends to be a fixer-upper of things, and I’m a-hankerin' to keep it around for a while.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

That sounds delicious! Someday, I will cobble with you and we will make wonderful fruit desserts!

DC said...

a cobbler of the soul. that's what I shall call you from now on!

Jeff Ferm said...

Having been the beneficiary of a serving of this dish, I should at least give all a fair warning. People want seconds and thirds of this dish and if you run out....everybody starts eyeing whatever poor soul eats his dish a little slower than the rest.....so be warned and make a DOUBLE recipe!!