Cherry Clafoutis Recipe

Cherry Clafoutis (crap photo disclaimer: taken with my mobile phone!)

There’s always an excuse. It’s been a month since I last blogged and guess what?  There’s another excuse!

This time around, the excuse involves time spent studying for my degree (not true), my full time day job (partly true), and enjoying the unusually good weather here in England over the past couple of weeks (entirely true).  Hey, I never said it was a good excuse.

Just because I haven’t been blogging, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking.  This weekend has seen bagels for breakfast (Gosia had a lie-in.  What else was I to do?), treacle sponge for desert (I’m currently addicted to self-saucing pudding recipes), and a whole load of other goodies filling my kitchen such as David Lebovitz’ goats cheese souffles and home-made Nutella.  This Cherry Clafoutis is another one of those goodies, one I saw while watching Raymond Blanc on TV the other week and just had to try…several times!

A clafoutis is a traditional French dessert made by – in basic terms – covering cherries in pancake batter and baking in the oven until puffed up and golden.  Simple, but delicious…

As with many things in life, there’s a few ways to tackle this.  The most traditional way is to cook the cherries with the pits in them – a better flavour, but a bit too much hard work when eating for my liking.  The alternative is to pit the cherries before using them – not a massive task, but if you fancy this for breakfast (as I had today when I took this photograph with my mobile phone – almost as an afterthought), a jar of pitted cherries in syrup works fine, and changes this into a 50 minute start to finish recipe.  And that beats a bowl of cornflakes any day of the week.

Pre-heat the oven to 200c / 390 f.

Next arrange your cherries in a baking dish – or, as I’ve done, in an oven proof pan.  If you’re using canned cherries, drain them and fry in a little butter for a couple of minutes – as the syrup oozes out, add in about 30g of sugar and fry for a couple more minutes until a syrup forms.

Meanwhile, combine all the other ingredients and mix until combined either by hand, using a stand mixer, or even with a food processor.

Finally pour the mixture over the cherries and place into the oven.  It’ll take about 40 minutes, until the clafoutis is puffed up and golden on top (of course don’t open the oven while it’s cooking).

One final note: it WILL sink when it comes out!  This is perfectly normal (or so I keep telling myself), but will still be light and airy and….delicious!