Café Beaujolais Cherry Clafouti

Thank you, Margaret S. Fox!

 

After going on and on in an earlier post about clafoutis and Café Beaujolais, where I had my first love at first bite, here at last is the Café Beaujolais recipe for clafouti, excerpted from founder/chef Margaret S. Fox’s cookbook Morning Food.  It requires little skill, mostly fresh fruit and a little patience while you wait to sink your teeth into it. I made a clafouti this morning using fresh raspberries, and oh my!

Clafoutis are traditional French desserts. My version has been adapted from a recipe published by Gaston LeNotre, then famous French patissier. Although they are especially good with cherries, they can be prepared with various kinds of fruit, including an assortment of leftovers, if that is whay you happen to have: apples, strawberries, pears, whatever. Anything but bananas or canned fruit cocktail, please. Canned fruit cocktail clafouti would set Franco-American relations back forty years.
 
1 egg
6 Tbsp white sugar
3 Tbsp white flour
6 Tbsp heavy whipping cream
1-1/3 cups pitted cherries
3 Tbsp melted butter (warn, not hot)
 
Preheat the oven to 400°.
In a bowl, beat the egg and sugar with a whisk until the mixture whitens. Stir in the flour and cream. Beat until completely smooth. Pour half of the batter over the cherries in a medium-sized bowl and fold together gently.
 
Spread the cherry mixture evenly over the bottom of a buttered 8-inch pie pan. Bake for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, beat the butter into the remaining batter, then pour this over the half-baked cherry batter. Replace in oven and bake for another 15 minutes, or unitl golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve.

*Note: I’ve used a stick blender with a whisk attachment. The blender’s accompanying marked cup makes it easy to divide and pour the batter.

Apple Clafoutis