Sometimes God punishes you

On a whim, I bought non-organic, waaaay non-local, out of season cherries from a fruit stand. Cherries! Clearly, I was just asking for it. Cherries in January, for god's sake. What was I thinking?

I plowed ahead and decided to make a claufuti, which as far as I understood it, is supposed to be like a pancake with cherries in it. Sounds good, right? I used Juila Child's recipe (I figured she wouldn't mind my out of season-ness, she was all about making regular items taste good).

three cups of pitted fresh cherries
1 and 1/4 cup milk
3 eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
2/3 cup sifted all purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar (set aside)

You're supposed to take all the ingredients except the sugar and the cherries and blitz in the blender for one minute. I was too lazy to get out my blender, so I just mixed it by hand. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that this is where the problem was - the batter wasn't well incorporated enough. There's a lot of liquid and not that much flour.....


But undisturbed by this, I plowed on. I poured a little batter into a pie pan, baked it at 350 degrees until a little film set, took it out, dumped the cherries in the pan and sprinkled them with the sugar.


Then I poured in the rest of the batter.


I put it back in the oven for an hour, and it was supposed to puff up and turn brown. It puffed up, but it was wildly uneven and it did not turn brown. I put it back in for another 15 minutes, but I couldn't get it to turn brown. I finally took it out, figuring it would be okay.


It was not. So much egg separated to the top of the claufuti, making it really custardy (or baked egg-y, if we're really calling a spade a spade). I had one piece, but I don't think I want any more. I may force some on Zack later.

Clearly, God is punishing me. It's back to apple crisp and bread pudding until the spring.....