How many ways can I possibly blog about making a wineberry crisp? By my count, this is the third. (Here are #1 and #2.) What can I say? Every summer we get a bigger harvest (those suckers are invasive, and we don’t exactly go to any effort to prune them back), and every summer I make a crisp out of them.
With each year comes new opportunities to refine my fruit crisp craft, and 2016’s refinement is one of personalization.
I am drawn to these for the same reason I prefer cupcakes to a full cake these days: portion control. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time eyeballing how much of a serving dish of wineberry crisp is actually 1/16th of the recipe. This may not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it does make it easy to accidentally sabotage your diet.
I find these little ramekin portions perfectly satisfying, yet I know that I have a tendency to serve myself a larger scoop than this when serving from a communal dish. That’s unnecessary excess.
This attention to portion size is even more important when you are following a strict diet for health reasons. Neil, for instance, has set some guidelines for himself in terms of salt and saturated fat (since his heart attack 4 years ago), and he adheres to them strictly. I would not be able to get him to eat this stuff, if I couldn’t promise it was healthy enough, and a big part of keeping that promise lies in getting the serving size correct.
So, yes, the ramekins are great for splitting up everything evenly. However, they are also perfect for customizing the recipe.
For example, Aidan has requested more of the crispy topping, and less fruit. He also doesn’t care for peaches all that much. So I put a little extra topping in his ramekins, and left out the peaches. Meanwhile, Neil’s ramekins have double the fruit, and slightly less topping.
The Recipe
I used my Wineberry Crisp 2.0 recipe, which is allergen-free, low-fat, low-sodium, and vegan as written, but you can feel free to substitute more readily-available ingredients if you have no special dietary concerns. (We don’t really need to worry about allergens around here, so I used white whole wheat flour in place of the gluten-free stuff this time.)
Ingredients
- 2 cups Wineberries or other type of raspberry
- 2 cups Blueberries
- 2 large Peaches very ripe
- 1/4 cup Granulated sugar
- 1 1/4 cups Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free All Purpose Baking Flour and 1/4 teaspoon Xanthan gum (or an equal amount of your favorite flour if gluten is not an issue for you)
- 1 teaspoon Featherweight baking powder (or regular baking powder, if you’re not watching salt intake)
- 3/4 cup Brown sugar packed, or maple sugar
- 1 cup Oats gluten-free, old-fashioned, rolled (or not gluten-free; your choice.)
- 1/2 cup Earth Balance Soy Free Buttery Sticks (or an equal amount of real butter, if you don’t care about fat content or about being vegan)
Directions
- Throw the two types of berries into a bowl, cut the peaches into small bits and throw those in. Sprinkle the granulated sugar over them, stir, and set aside.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, xanthan gum, baking powder, and sugar. Add the oats and combine. Melt the buttery stick. Add it to the dry ingredients, a little at a time, tossing between each addition. Mix until you have a large crumb.
- Divide the fruit mixture evenly among 16 ramekins. There should be roughly 2.25 ounces of fruit per dish.
- Divide the topping evenly among the ramekins. There should be roughly 3 TB of topping per dish.
- Place ramekins on one or two cookie sheets and bake for 30 minutes at 350F or until topping is browned and filling is bubbly.
I usually halve the recipe and make only 8 ramekins when it’s just going to be the four of us eating.
I have also been known to make the whole recipe, fill up 8 ramekins, and then put the rest in a small baking dish in the freezer. It’s handy to have an 8-serving dessert at the ready for those spontaneous Summer get-togethers.
This recipe works with all kinds of summer berries, and I suspect it would be really great with apples and pears, and a bit of apple pie spice in the topping… Actually, that sounds really delicious. I need to remember to try it in the fall!
The post Individual Fruit Crisps appeared first on Polka Dot Cottage.
