Dessert!

Well, after I made the black pasta and posted about it, I decided to make some tasty dessert.  So I tried my hand at a Strawberry Dumpling.  The thing is, I didn't have enough strawberries, so I opted instead to make a red berry dumpling.  The original recipe calls for a pint of strawberries.  Using strawberries, raspberries, and cranberries, I was able to get what amounts to a little more than a pint, but I went with it anyway. 

The recipe is pretty simple:

1. Cut up your berries, mix them with sugar, and let them sit for a while until the get juicy.

I mashed mine up with a pastry blender to bust up the cranberries.  Fun fact: cranberries are like little balloons that pop when you squash them!

2.  Make some simple biscuit dough with flour, baking powder, salt, butter, and milk.

3.  Then you just boil the berries and plop the dough in there for about 15 minutes.  The dough plumps up and cooks through.

The dumpling in this picture is the brainy-looking thing.  My mistake was two-fold.  First, I stirred the dough into the berries a little bit when I first added it.  I don't think I should have done any stirring.  Second, I was supposed to turn down the heat once I had added the dough.  I didn't do that.  I don't know if that actually had any effect, but I wish I'd followed the recipe more closely.

In the end, it looked like this:

Not beautiful, but still, I'd eat it.  I did eat it.

That's some ice cream on top, definitely a good idea.

I'd say this is a great recipe.  Next time I make it, I'll avoid the cranberries.  Even if they are fun to pop, they made the sauce just a little too tart.  I thought I could get around that by adding more sugar at the start, but I think there's more to it.

Coming up some time in the future, from the recipe book: number 14, Mozzarella and Tomato Skewers, and from the internet:  Raspberry Lemonade Bars.