Rustic Fruit Desserts: Crumbles, Buckles, Cobblers, Pandowdies, and More [A Cookbook]

I picked this book up after tasting the Cranberry Buckle recipe at a friend's party and thinking it may be a great and easy recipe to put together for family over the holidays... I never wound up making that because I decided to do the Pumpkin Custard with cookie crumb crust for Thanksgiving (oooohhhh it was such a good decision!) and I brought both the Cranberry Upside Down Almond Cake and the Apple Cranberry Oat Crumble to our office Christmas party last weekend to both rave reviews and recipe requests...so I'm making those again on Christmas. ...and, for me, when I get loads of recipe requests that is when I know a recipe was a winner. It's the Blue Ribbon measurement of friends and family. I watch my diet most of the year so when November and December comes, we truly celebrate, go off program, eat well, and don't count one calorie. Keeping true to form, I've tried many winning recipes over the last few months. However, I will be using this book often at our dinner parties year-round for desserts too...because it has a wealth of recipes for all seasons, and it enables me to take in a farmer's market and cook all-natural winning desserts with no artificial ingredients. These goodies are from scratch yet I have not found anything I've made to be fussy, long-winded, or time consuming in its instructions. Here are some favorites: Summer fruit trifle Upside down pear chocolate cake Boozy dried cherry, chocolate, and hazelnut bread pudding Fresh strawberry and ricotta tart Mimi's German Apple Cake Caramel Apple Steamed Pudding with Ginger Caramelized Pear Bread Pudding Vanilla Chiffon Cake It's not a large cookbook at 176 pages which include loads of pretty pictures, but it has a wealth of variety of seasonal fruit dessert recipes--from pandowdies to bread puddings, to crumbles, buckles, cobblers, cakes, pies...you name it. There are tips on making a great pie or tart crust, as well as recipes for both (The all-butter pie crust is REALLY good and turned out flawless and flaky). There are also great accompaniments to the fruit counterparts such as homemade icecreams, jams, and sauces. While I normally knock a cookbook down a star if no nutritional info is included since so many like to have some measurement of their intake, I don't hold that standard for an all-dessert cookbook. In fact, I'd probably rather not know! Although when your main ingredient is fruit, there tends to be less "damage" (I like to say to myself) and, dang it, I'm getting in some vitamins and antioxidants albeit really, really sweet ones! HA :-) NEGATIVES: A little more recipes would have been wonderful but it covered a nice range with what it included and maybe some nutritionals if I had to pick something...however, these aren't big deals in this well-produced, easy-to-follow, and beautifully compiled cookbook. It's a keeper. Year Round.

This is a wonderful addition to my collection of cookbooks which focus on local, seasonal foods. The authors hail from the Pacific Northwest but many of the fruits they use are available seasonally throughout the U.S. It is easy to understand why Gourmet magazine chose this for a Cook Book Club selection. The authors explain the difference between tarts (pie without a top crust), galette (free-form tart which doesn't require a pan), cobbler (deep-dish fruit pie with a dense pastry on top), grunt/slump (cobbler cooked on top of stove), crisp/crumble (baked fruit dessert with streusel topping), betty (fruit layered between or on top of diced bread cubes), pandowdy (deep-dish dessert with a crumbled biscuit topping), buckle (cake batter poured in a single layer with berries added to batter), teacake (simple cake like coffee cake), fool (summer fruit layered with whipped cream) and trifle (layered cake, thick cream, and fresh fruit). This type of dessert is less fussy than frosted cakes, soufflés and other more complicated desserts. Many of these recipes are fairly quick and involve cleaning and chopping fruit and then preparing the dough or crumble topping. For example, Mimi's German Apple Cake requires only 15 minutes of prep time before it goes in the oven. The book is into four chapters by season plus one Pantry chapter. Each seasonal chapter includes five full-page color photos of finished dishes and a few photos of ingredients or unfinished dishes. You can look up desserts by fruit in the index (some fruits such as apples appear in more than one chapter). The 14 recipes in the Spring chapter utilize rhubarb, cherry and strawberries. Examples include Upside-Down Sweet Cherry Cake, Rhubarb and Bing Cherry Brown Betty, and Lemon Buttermilk Rhubarb Bundt Cake. The Summer chapter includes 17 recipes which highlight plums, fresh berries (raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries) and stone fruit (peaches, apricots, plums) and include Gingered Peach and Blackberry Pandowdy, Raspberry Red Currant Cobbler, and Caramel Peach Grunt. The 13 Fall recipes utilize apples, quince, pears and figs and include Maple Apple Dumpling, Grape Galette, and Upside-Down Pear Chocolate Cake. The Winter chapter include 16 recipes which utilize apples, pears, cranberries and citrus fruits. The Winter recipes include Carmelized Pear Bread Pudding, Olive Oil Citrus Cake, and Cranberry Buckle with Vanilla Crumb. The Pantry chapter includes recipes for different doughs and pastry, both Vanilla and Berry Ice Cream, Vanilla bean Shortbread, Vanilla Chiffon Cake, and more. The authors describe what to look for to choose the freshest produce, how to store it (in or out of the refrigerator) and whether the fruit freezes well. There are a few recipes which use dried fruit (helpful in the off-season as well as when you need to through something together for surprise guests). There are hints throughout the book on advice on how to zest citrus, toast nuts, making car