Slow Food Junior: August Meeting - Fantastic Fruit Crisps and Cobblers

For the August meeting we focused on Summer Fruit desserts. I rode my bike to the Old Oakland Friday farmers market that morning and bought lots of fruit. My messenger bag was heavier and fuller than it is when I carry my books to school. It was a full load!

The blackberries and raspberries

We had blackberries, raspberries, white nectarines, yellow nectarines and peaches. I let everyone figure out what type of crisp and cobbler they wanted to make. They came to the agreement of having a blackberry and raspberry crisp and a nectarine and raspberry cobbler.

Preparing the fruit

Smile!

Layers of white and yellow nectarines

The raspberry and nectarines all ready to have the cobbler dough put on top

Out of the oven with a nice golden brown cobbler topping

Mariah showing off the lovely crisp topping

Mixing the berries with the sugar

Ready to go in the oven

Chester stirring the custard for the ice cream

To go along with our fruit desserts we made cinnamon ice cream. Instead of simply putting the cream, sugar and flavoring into the ice cream maker, we made a custard based ice cream. This means that there are egg yolks in it and we make a custard as the base of the ice cream. This produces a smoother and creamier ice cream. It also takes a little more work. But in the end it is worth it! To make the cinnamon we steeped a couple of cinnamon sticks in the cream before we used it. This produces a subtle cinnamon flavor. This technique can be used for other flavors as well. For example, it is possible to make an incredible mint chocolate chip (or simply mint) ice cream by steeping fresh mint leaves in the cream (this even gives the ice cream a slight natural green tint).