Sunday, March 28, 2010

Peach Cobbler (Recipe Included)

This week, I was ready to venture into the world of cooking dessert in the crock pot. Again, who knew a crock pot could be so versatile. What I'm learning to love and appreciate, is that a crock pot really works like a portable oven. And on a day when I had the air conditioning running, the last thing I wanted to do was turn on the oven. So dessert in the crock pot was perfect! I got out the cook books and what I learned was that a lot of dessert recipes seem to call for apples. I'll have to try one of those some other time. But for tonight, we had cobbler!

I used the Cherry Cobbler recipe from page 248 of my Fix-It & Forget-It Lightly: Healthy Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker cook book. But, I'm not a huge fan of cherry cobbler so we substituted peaches instead. First, here is the recipe as listed in the cook book:

21-oz can low-fat, low-sodium cherry pie filling
1 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup skim milk,
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/4 tsp salt
  1. Pour pie filling into greased slow cooker
  2. Combine remaining ingredients. Beat until smooth. Spread over pie filling.
  3. Cover. Cook on high 1 1/2 - 2 hours on high
 And here's how it all went down:


Like I mentioned, we substituted peach pie filling for the cherry. Really I was hoping to find blackberry pie filling, but our neighborhood Randall's didn't have any. Our only choices were cherry, apple and peach. So peach it was!

The cook book called for a 3.5 qt bowl, but once I put the peaches in my 4qt bowl, I realized it was way too big. So I switched to the 2qt bowl and it was great! I sprayed some Pam cooking spray in there, and put in the peaches.

I mixed all the dry ingredients together first (I seem to remember being taught that so I just went with it) and then added the wet ingredients to that. Mixed until smooth and got this:


Poured that over the peaches and it looked like this:


Now, patiently wait for it to finish. Except, nothing told me how I would know when it was actually done. I checked at 1 1/2 hours (thankful for the glass lid so I didn't have to open it to see) and it sort of seemed like the middle was moist so kept it in for another 15 minutes. Checked again...and the edges were starting to slightly brown but I wasn't quite sure, so we kept it in for another 15 minutes. All in all, it seemed like the 2 hours was just about right. Although, I took a tooth pick and poked at the middle for a bit trying to see if it was cooked all the way (again, isn't that what you do with baked goods?).


It turned out really good! We served it with vanilla ice cream (not mentioned in the cook book, but definitely required, don't you think?).

You'll notice though that there seems to be a high dough to fruit ratio - so I think next time I would use 2 cans of fruit filling to the same amount of the dough. Just for more fruit. (It's a little hard to tell because my bowl is the same color as the peaches - LOL.)


I thought the vanilla had a strong flavor - I guess I am just not used to cooking with real ingredients like vanilla extract. I can't remember the last time I owned a bottle of vanilla extract (I'm a cake mix in a box kind of girl) so I don't think it really was overpowering, I just wasn't used to it. I definitely think I'll be tracking down some blackberry pie filling for next time though.

It was really fun to have dessert! We are known to like a sweet treat in the evening, and since this came from the low-calorie cookbook it wasn't bad (230 calories and .5g fat) - okay that is before the ice cream. :-) But it was also a nice compromise to dinner being a reheat of the Turkey Chili I made a couple weeks ago. By the way, that froze wonderfully! I put individual servings in sandwich-size Ziploc bags, and then all of them in a gallon size Ziploc and put it in the freezer.



Tonight, I just pulled out a few servings (including one for lunch tomorrow), nuked them in the microwave for 30 seconds to help it separate from the plastic bag, threw it in a pot and warmed it up! Gotta love easy dinners!

I think I could get used to this!

1 comment:

  1. Delicious. The bread topping came out nice and thick and was so good. I believe a variety of various fruit fillings must be tried with this recipe and I volunteer to be the taster!

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