Cherry Clafoutis (with plums)

In a few weeks time we are having a French themed dinner party and plan on cooking among other things Duck a l'Orange. As neither of us have cooked this particular dish before we though it best to have a smaller dinner party to trial the recipe. We invited 4 friends around for us to experiment on. I'm not going to give you the recipe for the duck as there are already a million recipes for Duck a l'Orange on the internerd, instead I will give you the recipe for the dessert (and a picture of the bird just after it came out of the oven).

This is what the duck looked like after roasting and continuous basting in the orange juice, Grand Marnier, cider vinegar and brown sugar mixture for 2 hours. It was delicious.



And this is the Cherry (plum) Clafoutis



This recipe is not one of Julia's adaptations or an invention of her own. With the exception of the substitution of plums for cherries the recipe is taken straight from 'The Food of France' an excellent French cookbook with recipes by Maria Villegas and Sarah Randell and published by Murdoch Books. Of course many of the recipes in the book are traditional French recipes attributable to no one in particular.

Cherry (plum) Clafoutis

185ml of thick (double/heavy) cream
1 vanilla pod
125ml of milk
3 eggs
55g/1/4 of a cup of caster sugar
85g/2/3 of a cup of plain flour
1 tablespoon of kirsch
450g/1 lb of black cherries
Icing sugar

The first thing to avoid in this recipe is taking your can of cherries from the pantry and finding that they expired in 2004. Hmmm suddenly our lovely dinner party dessert was not looking so promising. Fortunately we still had bottled plums from our tree that Julia had preserved a couple of months ago, they made a great substitute.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.
Put the cream in a small saucepan. Split the vanilla pod in two and scrape out the seeds with a the flat edge of a small sharp knife and add seeds and pod to the milk . If you don't have vanilla pods use 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence.
Heat gently for a couple of minutes, then remove from the heat add the milk and cool. Strain to remove the pod and seeds (don't worry if you don't get all the seeds).
Whisk the eggs with the sugar and flour, then stir into the cream. Add the kirsche and cherries (plums) and stir well. Pour into a 23cm/9" round baking dish and bake for 30-35 mins or until golden on top. Dust with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream. We kept the preserving syrup from the bottled plums then reduced it by half by simmering and poured a little over the served portions. Wonderful and very quick and easy.