Clafouti...Gesundheit!

So, the other day I got this email from Kraft Kitchens.  I don't know if it exists south of the border, too, but Kraft Canada is the absolute devil of food preparation and good food recipes.  They use every pre-packaged food item they can find to speed up the process of cooking to produce the most unnatural foods out there.....  But they take beautiful food pictures, and have creative ideas, so I end up receiving these emails and then googling the actual recipes that they are trying to duplicate, and then have to convert those ideas to paleo-friendly foods if they interest me at all.

So I received their crazy rendition of cherry clafouti and had to google it.  What I found was Julia Child's recipe and I just had to work with it!

So clafouti is a dessert served in little coffee houses all over France.  It's not a pretty confection, in fact, behind the display case glass, it is often the ugly duckling and yet remains a popular choice even when it sits beside fancy fluffy decorated cakes and pies.  What it really is, is a baked custard with cherries in it.  It is simple to make, lightly sweet (mostly naturally sweet because of the cherries), and tastes even better as cold leftovers (if it actually lasts until the leftover stage...) 

So here's what I did...

Makes 4 hearty breakfast servings (with bacon!!) or 6 dessert servings

Ingredients:

3 cups cherries--fresh or frozen (I used sweet, fresh)
1 can coconut milk
4 eggs
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1 Tbs vanilla
4 scoops stevia powder (equal to 4 tsp sugar)
1/8 tsp salt
1 Tbs lemon zest, optional
2 tsp coconut sugar or raw, organic crystallised cane sugar (optional)

Method:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Butter a pie dish.  Pit your cherries, if using fresh.  Set aside.  Mix all other ingredients --except coconut sugar-- in a blender, pulsing until blended. 

Pour about 1/3 of the batter into the pie dish and bake about 8 minutes, until the bottom begins to set.  Then add your cherries, then pour in the rest of your batter and bake for another 30 minutes until set firm.  Remove from oven and move your oven rack to top 1/3 of oven --not quite the highest position but the one under that-- and turn the oven up to broil.  Sprinkle the crystallised sugar all over the top of your clafouti.  If you're squeamish about this, don't bother with the sugar, but it does add a lightly crunchy sweet touch and it's a very scant 2 tsp.  heck, drop it to 1 tsp if you want.  Would this work with honey?  I'm not sure if honey can crisp up.  You try it and tell me.





Place your clafouti under the broiler for about 3 minutes.  Keep a close eye on it!  Watch the cherries start to burst and spill juices on top of the clafouti and the juices will meld with the sugar and crystallise a little bit like brulee.  Watch it go all golden and and a bit puffy on top.

Remove and let sit for about 5 minutes.



See that huge bursty cherry?? Hot cherry innards!!

Delicious warm--watch out for hot, bursty cherries!!  But equally delicious cold.  Can be packed and taken to work to make non-paleo co-workers jealous....