Elderberry clafoutis pie

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans! To our neighbors in the great white north, Happy Thanksgiving, 6 weeks late, and to our southern neighbors, feliz Día de la Revolución! Wherever you're from, I hope you're celebrating the harvest season with a sweet treat. 

Thanksgiving is one of the few occasions where I will attempt to bake. As a rule, I personally hate baking. It's more science than art--get something wrong and it generally won't work out at all, unlike cooking where almost any mistake can be mitigated, one way or another. Baking also generally involves a lot of steps, a lot of bowls, a lot of prep work, and significantly more time than cooking--all of these are things I hate. So, in our household, my husband generally does most of the baking, including all the Christmas baking of cookies, cherry coconut bars, and fudge. 

But my husband is a nurse and it's rare for him to get the entirety of Thanksgiving off.  And while Christmas baking can sort of be worked in in and around and throughout the holiday season, Thanksgiving dessert needs to be prepared on Thanksgiving Day, meaning it generally falls to me to make. I usually make a fruit cobbler or a fruit crisp, as they are easy, basically foolproof, and require some of the least prep work in the baking world. 

But for the past year, recipes for clafoutis have been popping up practically non-stop in my Pinterest feed, piquing my curiosity. 

Like a cobbler, a clafoutis involves basically 5 steps: grease a baking pan, layer in fruit, mix a bunch of things, spread on top, and bake. 

And, despite the town of McKinney clearing away much of the elderberry bushes in a part I frequent--why did they do this? They didn't replace it with anything--I still had several containers of the fruit in the freezer. So, I decided to try my hand at an elderberry clafoutis for this year's Thanksgiving. 

This recipe requires some special equipment:

• Blender
• Deep pie pan; my pan was around 1.5" deep and was barely enough. A 2" pan would be much better. 

Elderberry Clafoutis Pie 

• 2 cups fresh or frozen elderberries | If frozen, defrost and reserve the liquid
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup plain white flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar, divided into 3/4 and 1/4 portions* 
• 2/3 cup heavy cream or whole milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp almond extract
• 1/4 tsp salt
• Butter to grease the pan

1. Preheat the oven to 325
2. Grease a deep pie pan with butter.
3. Spread your elderberries out in the greased pan. 
4. Add any reserved elderberry liquid, the eggs, the flour, the 3/4 cup of sugar, the cream or milk, vanilla, almond and salt to the blender and liquify. 
5. Pour the mixture over the top of the elderberries--slowly, if you can. Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar over everything evenly.
6. Put the pan in the oven and bake for around 45 minutes until it puffs up and turns golden brown on top.

* This makes a lightly sweet clafoutis. Next time I would probably increase the sugar a little to offset the tartness of the elderberries more. I would also sprinkle the elderberries themselves with sugar in the pan. 

Right out of the oven

The result and what I would do differently next time

Elderberries float, which doesn't provide the intended 
layer effect

The elderberry clafoutis was tasty, but it did have the regular issues that any elderberry dish has, primarily being the crunchy elderberry seeds. There's no real way to work around these, unless you have a juicer and want to juice the berries first, so just be aware, your topping is going to be textural. 

The bigger issue is that I don't think that elderberries are right for a clafoutis because they are too small and too light. This means they float when you pour the liquid mixture over them. 

A clafoutis is supposed to come out as layers: crust on top, moist cake in the middle, and fruit on the bottom. But because of the floating, the finished product didn't have that layer effect. Instead, my fruit rose to the top (see pic) and became part of the crust. Still tasty, but not the intended result. 

Other than that, a great, lightly sweet dessert made with the kind of wild ingredients that would have been eaten by both the Native Americans and the early European settlers, though they likely would have been dried to make it into November.