Spiced berry maple betty

Tonight I cooked dinner for our friends Cath and Gregg – a lovely recipe for thyme-roasted belly of pork from Diana Henry’s amazing book, Food from Plenty.  I served it with yellow, orange and purple heritage carrots, purple sprouting broccoli, balsamic roasted red onions, and celeriac, mustard and parsley mash. Not bad, even if I say so myself!  Anyway, in browsing through Diana Henry’s book, my attention was grabbed by her recipe for blackberry, apple and maple brown betty.  She describes it as “a great, down-home American dessert that’s even easier to make than crumble.”  Anything described as “down-home” sounds good to me!

This is my adaptation of that recipe, but I used mixed frozen berries instead of apple and fresh blackberries.  Apart from that, and the addition of a little cinnamon, I’d followed her recipe exactly when I made this, which included so much sugar (mixed with the cake crumbs, and also mixed with the fruit before maple syrup is poured over them) that it was unbelievably sweet.  So here I’ve written the recipe without any extra sugar, as I’m sure it’s completely unnecessary.  Apart from that, it’s amazing – it feels a bit wrong to use cake instead of a crumble mixture, but wow it’s delicious – it’s so moist and soaks up lots of the fruit, so it’s a bit like a hot SummerPudding (which is my all-time favourite dessert)!

Ingredients 

250g stale cake crumbs (I used a shop-bought pack of mini madeira cakes, which are quite dry already)

½ tsp ground allspice

½ tsp ground ginger

½ tsp ground cinnamon

100g butter, melted

700g frozen berries (blueberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, red grapes, raspberries and strawberries)

2 tbsp maple syrup

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and butter a large pie dish.
2. Place the cake in a food processor and blitz until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
3. Mix together the spices and add half to the cake crumbs.
4. Add the remaining spices to the berries and stir to coat them well.
5. Pour the melted butter over the cake crumbs, stir well, and then pour half of this mixture into the bottom of the prepared pie dish.
6. Pile the fruit on top and drizzle with maple syrup.
7. Cover the fruit with the remaining cake crumbs, and cover the dish loosely with foil.
8. Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and continue to bake for a further 20 minutes or until the top is golden.