CEiMB--Mixed Berry Cobbler

As much as I love baked goods and desserts, I don't make them often. This week's recipe for Craving Ellie in My Belly, hosted by Pam at Cookies With Boys, was Mixed Berry Cobbler. I don't know much about cobbler except that it usually involves fruit and not a lot of cake-like carbs. Definitely not the first thing I'm choosing from the dessert buffet. Between me not giving cobblers a chance and not baking often, this was the perfect recipe to change things up.

I started off with the fruit portion of the cobbler. The recipe calls for two 12 ounce bags of frozen mixed berries. For some reason, my grocery store only had 10 ounce bags, so I bought three bags and only used two and a half of them. So maybe I used 25 ounces of mixed berries. It's extra berrylicious. To the berries, which I thawed during the day, I added the zest of one orange. Zest looks funny, like a stuffed animal started shedding on my fruit.

Then it was time for snow! By snow, I mean whole wheat flour and sugar. After combining the flour, sugar, and fruit, I added the mixture to a 8x8 pan sprayed with cooking spray.

Now on to the topping. It starts with whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. The directions say to cut the butter into the dry ingredients until small "pebbles" are formed. I vaguely remember reading something about making sure the butter is super cold, so I put it in the freezer for a short bit.

To be honest, I have no idea if I reached the pebble stage. It seemed like all the butter was incorporated into the flour mixture with no big butter chunks standing. It was getting late, so I shrugged it off and moved on to the next step--combining buttermilk and oil together and adding the mix into the dry "pebbles." My grocery store only had nonfat buttermilk rather than the low-fat buttermilk the recipe calls for. Again, I shrugged it off and combined the wet and dry ingredients.

I gently mixed everything together, careful not to overmix. Don't want the mixing police to write me a ticket. Once combined, I spooned the topping over the fruit in six blobs. I believe Ellie calls them mounds, but mine were definitely blobs.

I topped everything thing off with a bit more sugar, then into the oven for a half hour. Time to relax, or start working all the dishes I dirtied during the process.

After the thirty minutes was up, I took the cobbler out of the oven. The fruit was bubbling and the blobs were a nice golden brown. At least until I cut into them, then they looked a little bit uncooked. Whoops.

I decided to try mine with a little bit of vanilla ice cream. I must have used way too much orange zest because that's all I could taste. My husband seemed to like it, so it wasn't a total fail. We have quite a bit leftover, so I will try it again after reheating it in the oven.

I will definitely try making another cobbler, but I will definitely skip the orange zest (or use much less) and spread my cobbler topping across the fruit to help it bake more evenly. I did like the whole wheat flour and will definitely be using that again.