Mission Critical - The Birthday Cake

Brombeere had a birthday, which is a happy thing.  We like having her around and having birthday after birthday.  The last several years her interest in birthday cake has declined, preferring instead fruit of one sort or another.  Or occasionally she'll go for cheesecake.  She likes cheesecake and her favorite is the Jello mix, the quick, easy stuff.  This year she was leaning toward watermelon but then saw a recipe for berry cobbler that was supposed to be real easy and real good.  So she looked at me and said, "You ought to make that for me!"  When we went shopping and she got all the ingredients then I knew I was on the hook.

So, as is my custom, I got everything I was going to need out and ready and got started.  This recipe called for the juice and zest of two lemons. I had reservations about the zest, last time I cooked and included the zest I hadn't particularly liked how it turned out.  But I decided to take a chance and include it. 

The recipe also called for the juice from the lemons.  So I'm looking at all the seeds in the lemons and thinking, how am I going to keep all those seeds out of my cobbler?  I wasn't excited to be picking out seeds so I squeezed them into a cup, fished out all the seeds, and then dumped the juice in with the rest of the berries.  Now that probably seemed like the obvious solution to you right up front but I was pretty proud of myself for thinking of it.

Then, as I got a little farther along with the recipe it called for powdered sugar and I'm thinking, What powdered sugar?  But when I looked back up at the ingredients, there it was.  I had missed it.  So I got some out, measured it up, and dumped it in.

So far it was looking pretty good.  I liked this because it didn't call for having all the berries sliced, chopped, or otherwise cut up.  Just dump them in whole.  That was pretty nice.

So once I had all the stuff together for the berries I stirred it all up and set it aside.

Then I got out my favorite cooking toy and whipped up the batter.  I put all the dry ingredients in, along with the butter, which I had chopped into chunks, and it the button.

It made pretty short work of mixing all the stuff.  Very nice.

Then I added the Half and Half until it was the right consistency.

Then the berries went into the pan ...

... and the batter went on top and it all went into the oven for an hour.

Our oven cooks a little hot and I forgot so it got just a little bit over done.  But it still looked and smelled pretty good.

Served it up with a nice dollop of ice cream to melt over the top of it and it was all ready.

And then, the taste test - it passed!  It was yummy!  Couldn't even tell the zest was in there at all, blended in quite nicely.

Good to the end.  Have to admit, I thought it turned out pretty good!

Nothing left but a sink full of dishes.  One of these days I'm going to figure out how to cook without leaving such a pile of dirty dishes.  Then it will be perfect!