Saturday, at the Farmer’s market, I couldn’t resist a whole flat of organic Albion strawberries for just $10! This week will surely be filled with delicious strawberry treats- starting with a strawberry clafoutis. Clafoutis is a fantastic French dessert traditionally made with cherries, although I seem to recall my grandmother making a version with French prunes, pits and all.
Look how organic my strawberries are! I've got a little visitor to wash off.
Since I was flush with ripe beautiful berries, I decided to combine a few of my favorite things, strawberries, vanilla, and flowers in this lovely homey French dessert. It’s a double dose of vanilla with both Tahitian vanilla extract and vanilla bean in the batter. The strawberries come from, well, strawberries, and the flowers come from orange flower water. I would love to garnish this with real orange blossoms, that would be just beautiful, but alas, I’ve got none, but I always have orange flower water- it just tastes (and smells) divine. You’ll see I was pretty crazy for this, there are lots of pictures, I hope you don’t mind.
So, here it is: Strawberry Orange Blossom Clafoutis- sweet, simple, and delicious.
- INGREDIENTS
- 1 ¼ c milk
- ¾ c flour
- 3 eggs
- 2 tbsp corn starch
- ½ c granulated sugar
- ½ tbsp vanilla extract
- ½ large vanilla bean
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 2 tablespoons orange flower water (or more to taste)
- 1 ½ c fresh ripe strawberries
- 1 tbsp confectioner’s sugar
- butter for greasing
- INSTRUCTIONS
- Preheat oven to 350°
- Grease an oval 2-quart baking/gratin dish then dust with a bit of sugar
- Hull and halve your strawberries then toss in a bowl with corn starch and set them cut side down in the baking dish & set aside
- Scrape the vanilla bean, well to get all the yummy vanilla bits out*
- Crack your eggs then dump into your blender **
- Now, dump all other ingredients EXCEPT confectioners sugar into your blender and give a few spins until neatly blended together.
- Pour the batter over the berries and pop into your preheated oven
- Bake for 40-50 minutes until a knife comes out clean
- Sprinkle with confectioners sugar and eat warm
- *You can save the pod of your bean and set into a jar of sugar or sea salt to make vanilla sugar or vanilla salt!
- ** I always crack my eggs into a separate bowl just in case I get a little shell. That way it’s easy to do damage control- and did you know that the easiest way to get shell out is to use a piece of shell to fish it out?
YUM! i want some right now, for breakfast! the pictures are beautiful- makes me wanna reach through the computer for a strawberry
Um, OMG, WOW! I am drooling…