Blackberry Pudding, a (small) recipe by Dominique Rock, inspired by older
recipes... last edited on Jan 1 2025 JUMP TO RECIPE
When my roommate brought back home from an office party a little basket of blackberries last month,
which we both usually never buy, it reminded me of my youth. We had a cottage, I mean my parents when I was a kid and teen, near Val-des-Monts, Québec, where there was loooots of nature... But there was also electricity and motor bikes and outboard cruisers... anyways, around the end of July, every year, mid-august, there was lots, and lots of wild raspberries to be picked.
The neighbours had a tradition recipe for these, the Wild Raspberry Pudding. I handed out the recipe, a sample for my mother to taste, and full baskets of raspberries and pleaded her to bake one (or more... always...), and adopt this tradition.
She disdained it like my parents looked with contempt everything else from that family, saying that this recipe was a disastrous and very low class way to treat the very noble raspberries, similar in taste to the corn dogs they ate (which I also asked for, to no avail). So my parents kept eating the "noble" raspberries fresh, sometimes with cream and a bit of sugar, and my mom refused to bake the Wild Raspberry Pudding.
After we sold the cottage when I was like 16 yo, I completely forgot about that recipe. The magic of the sweet and somewhat bitter taste stuck in my head though, and when I saw the blackberries my roommate brought, my brain automatically connected with the Wild Raspberry Pudding from my youth.
So I started my quest on the Internet to find a similar recipe. I found one that seemed to look the same in the pics, and knowing baking somewhat, I was figuring it'd be similar a taste.
So it's a recipe found on Food dot com, that was submitted by Derf2440, who turns out to be Dorothy from B.C. who passed away in 2013; she said in her post that it's a recipe from Canadian Living magazine, and I bet it's the same recipe that my neighbours used half a century ago; kind of a basic popular recipe that goes around, and can actually be adapted to other fruits, and more.
But since my tools are very limited -all I ever owned I lost (long story, actually told earlier on this blog)-, I had to adapt it: I had only a small Corning Ware 6.5 X 6.5 X 2 inches pan. On top of this, the fresh blackberry left-over my roommate brought home totaled 167 grams, so about 8 oz, that was a little more than half the frozen raspberries in Derf2440's recipe, but I liked the proportions of it and estimated that about half of it all would fit my pan.
And it did; I tweaked a few ingredients for different reasons, and adapted
it to fresh fruits, but the recipe can surely be done with frozen
blackberries or raspberries. Fresh blackberries are quite firm compared to
raspberries, and probably also to frozen berries, they remain somewhat
complete and firm even after 50 minutes baking, and I like that.
The final result is somewhat similar to the most popular dessert half a century ago and more in Québec: the Pouding Chômeur, but much less sweet, about half the sugar, and with fresh fruits so it's actually almost a healthy dessert, but still very much down to Earth and hearty fulfilling dessert (or breakfast actually); too harsh and low class for my parents who tried to obliterate the taste from my life and that's very sad.
I like hearty foods, usual and popular recipes from all over the world with simple available and affordable ingredients; I'm mostly poor and try to make best with what's on special and available, most time ending with very healthy plates and forcing me to innovate and find new and old ways to cook I might have forgotten.
I now intend to try this recipe (and the pouding chômeur recipe which I'm perfecting RN), in different pans, the type of pans people who never bake have: foil pans from the dollar store, forgotten bread pans, or simply a simple stove-top pot, so that anyone will want to start to bake.
This is my 1st attempt at publishing a recipe with pics of the whole procedure so please bare with me, this probably isn't the best place to do that but I'll try
Dominique Rock
Blackberry Pudding
small recipe, adapted by Dominique Rock
170
gr (8 oz) blackberries (or raspberries)
5 TBsp sugar (I used brown
sugar...)
4 TBsp (1/4 cup) butter
6 TBsp sugar (again I
used brown sugar, was out of white)
3 TBsp milk (I always use almond
milk)
2/3 cup flour
1 egg
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
pinch
of salt
Pro baker instructions syrup: add 2 TBsp sugar and lemon juice to the fresh berries to extract their juice, then extend it with water to 3/4 cup, add 3 TBsp sugar, bring to a
boil, then set aside and let cool down; mix butter with 6 TBsp sugar, egg
and milk, then dry ingredients; toss berries in a 6,6 X 6.5 X 2 inches pan (or a bread pan, could be 8 X 4 X 2,7 foil), pour batter on top, then pour syrup on top; bake 50 minutes @ 350
Detailed instructions
So the 1st move is actually to take the butter and the egg out of the fridge an hour before.
Then extract some berry juice from the fresh fruits. Here's how:
after rinsing the berries, toss them in a bowl and squeeze about half a lemon (or I guess 1 TBsp of bottled concentrated lemon juice) on the berries, with 2 TBsp of sugar, and let sit 20-40 minutes, stirring occasionally;
juice will come out; toss the berries in the baking pan, and extend this juice with water to 3/4 cup (Okay I changed the recipe
since the pics, it is 3/4 of a cup).
Add 3 TBsp of sugar to the juice and bring to a boil in a stove-top pan,
then set aside and let cool down while we blend the batter.
in a bowl, drop:
6 TBsp sugar
1/4 cup softened butter (or 4
TBsp)
- mix with a wood spoon
- add egg
- mix again
- add 1/3 cup of flour, then
- drop baking powder and salt on top of the flour
- add the other 1/3 cup of flour
- pour the batter over the berries in the pan
(the lumps in the batter are butter (it's not a problem), it's Winter and my butter wouldn't get soft on the counter)
- pour the 1 1/4 cup of cooled down syrup on top of the batter
- bake 50 minutes 350
notes:
(this is a small recipe thought for a 6.5 X 6.5 X 2 inches pan;
it would also work in a bread pan, if using foil bread pan 8 X 4 X 3 it
might be a little tight and would look different as the cake would rise
more, I'd need to try); as you can see, the serving bowl is almost as big as
the baking pan... it's a small recipe.
If you have questions, ask me on Bluesky
Au revoir 😋 Dominique Rock
P.S. as I'm editing this recipe (so ashamed I published with errors in the instructions) I realize how cool it is that it perfectly fits the mood of my blog, with a deep look into its social and philosophical roots; it is here presented as a clash between two social classes of French Canadians, one who searches refinement and actually be more like the British who had conquered us two Centuries before, and one who enjoys fully being who they are: grassroots uneducated people who were seen and qualified by some as parvenus (they owned a garage and were actually richer than my parents), and I'm surprised to find the exact same term we use in French is used also in English, parvenu; So yes, actually my Great Grand-Father was a blacksmith and became rich with the birth of the Railways, and he sent his last son to school, and he became doctor, and my father also went to university... As for the neighbors at our cottage, I couldn't see, myself, the social clash, as I'm in the autistic spectrum (ASD), therefore I don't perceive these social subtleties, I can now rationalize and understand them when explained (but still cannot 'perceive' them), but not when I was a child or a teen, I wasn't able to. So I present the story as I perceive it now, a clash between social classes, whereas back then I simply couldn't see why that dessert didn't deserve respect, not even a try, since it was so tasty, and also since my mom baked the Pouding Chômeur, a very popular dessert amongst the lower classes, and similar recipe, but I realized later in life, my Mom actually seldom baked the Pouding Chômeur, and only after her many children demanded it. I also realized her version of the Pouding Chômeur was a toned down version from her mother, more acceptable to more 'refined' palates. But I'm in search of the ideal Pouding Chômeur recipe, a story to be followed soon on Mue à l'envers.
