Monday, August 12, 2019

Blackberry Flognarde from Everyday Dorie

Dorie Greenspan writes the best cookbooks - go ahead and fight me, I know I'm right. So I ran into Everyday Dorie in the New Books section of the library where I work and brought it home with me.

In the dessert section, I came across the flognarde which turns out to be clafoutis for any fruit but cherries. I had very good blackberries in season and decided to use them in this recipe. The official recipe in the cookbook is for plums, but then she gives variations for berries, apples, and the original cherry. I have made the changes in the recipe below that are specific to berries, although I only used blackberries. Please read the notes afterward to find out how I made a few ingredient replacements to make it a bit lower carb, since that matters at our house (I figure with a baked pancake like cake, it's easy to adapt in these ways without losing a lot of the recipe integrity.)



Berry Flognarde

It's best to use blueberries, raspberries, and/or blackberries for flognarde. Figure on 1 pint berries. You want them to loosely fill the pie plate. While you can use brandy or cognac, berries are ovely with kirsch (a flora cherry liqueur), grand marnier, or (in lesser quantities, say 1 tbsp) a nut liqueur like amaretto or frangelico.

1 pint berries
1/2 cup (68 grams) all-purpose flour*
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp cinnamon or a few scrapings of fresh ginger
pinch of fine sea salt
4 tbsp (2 oz; 57 grams) unsalted butter
1/2 cup (100 grams) sugar*
3 large eggs
2 tbsp Kirsch, Grand Marnier or 1 Tbsp Amaretto or Frangelico
1 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup (240 ml) whole milk
about 1/4 cup (25 grams) sliced almonds, for topping (optional)
confectioner's sugar, for dusting (optional)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat to 350 F. Choose a 9-inch pie plate, a porcelain quiche pan, or another oven proof pan (preferably not metal) with the capacity of 1 quart. Butter the pan and place it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Toss the berries into the pie plate and jiggle them around until you get an even layer.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, spice, and salt.

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the sugar. When the mixture is homogeneous, beat in the eggs one at a time, followed by the liqueur and vanilla. Whisk in the dry ingredients. The mixture will be thick, so get it as well blended as you can without beating it, and then start stirring in the milk, which will thin the batter considerably. You'll have a pourable batter that might have a few lumps - ignore them. Pour the batter over the berries and scatter over the almonds, if using.

Bake for 60-70 minutes, until the flognarde is puffed all the way to the center, feels firm to the touch, and is golden and cracked across the surface; the juice from the berries might be bubbling - so much the better. A skewer inserted into the center will come out clean. Transfer the flognarde, on the baking sheet, to a rack and let cool to room temperature.

Dust the flognarde with confectioner's sugar, if you'd like, slice and serve.

Storing: Some people think you must eat the flognarde at room temperature the day it's made. I (Dorie) love it like that, but I also think it's nice straight from the refrigerator the next day. If you've got leftovers, cover and chill them, and see what you think.

Notes from JennyBakes:

I replaced the flour with almond flour and the sugar with coconut sugar, which is why my flognarde is a bit darker in color. It still worked! 

I used Amaretto with the blackberries. Also, because I had Amaretto.

In my household we use the Viking pronunciation of flognarde which can probably be typed as FLOGNARD!!!! RAH!!

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