A very late strawberry rhubarb cobbler

I'm getting into terrible habits at the moment - leaving laundry to the last minute, not really thinking through the weekly shop so having to top it up nearly every day, being woefully behind on the hoovering and (by far the worst) posting my Sweet Melissa Sundays posts wildly late! So I must apologise profusely to my fellow bakers and I shall try to do better. As for the laundry and hoovering, I'm making no guarantees...

Back to this week's pick - Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler Pie. Rhubarb and I have a mixed history. Growing up, it was one of three things I would simply refuse to eat - the others being courgettes and aubergine (or eggplants for all you Americans out there). Which was a little unfortunate given my parents' love of growing the stuff. And courgettes (not aubergines - phew!). Rhubarb was synonymous with being persuaded that the slimy goop in front of me was actually very good for me and I had to eat it - rhubarb fool, rhubarb crumble, rhubarb and custard... All equaled a traumatising childhood in my eyes (note - this may be a slight exaggeration. My childhood was in fact wonderful and in no way traumatising. Apart from my big brother and a certain incident with a pram and a rather large muddy puddle but we shan't go into that now!).

Then, about a year ago, I started to experiment with it to find I actually liked the stuff! I think a certain strawberry rhubarb white chocolate mousse cake might've had something to do with my conversion. I can only conclude that the reason I didn't like it before was my mother's motto that you can always add more sugar to a dish but you can't take it away. This meant that the aforementioned rhubarb crumbles were eye wateringly sour and when we attempted to add a spoon more sugar, we were of course scolded and told we were rotting our teeth. I need not add that my mother does not have a sweet tooth!

That's the thing with cooking rhubarb - too little sugar and you'll end up with a dish so tart your teeth with be sucked back into your head, but too much and all the tartness and delicate flavour will be lost. With this recipe, that was the main alteration I made right up front - I actually halved the sugar after finding a similar recipe from a very trusted source. I also subbed half the sugar (about 75g) for soft brown sugar, upped the cornstarch by about 1/2tbsp and added a teaspoon of ground ginger. If anything goes better wit rhubarb than ginger, I've yet to find it. I found this also cut through the sweetness of the strawberries nicely - with the original sugar quantity quoted in the recipe I can't help but think this would have been tooth achingly sweet.

I did actually intend to make this as a cobbler pie - I promise!! But I had a mishap with the pastry. I have no idea what I did wrong but it was a disaster! I must've measured the butter out incorrectly as it did not look right at all. After baking off a little disc to check the pastry and binning the resulting weird greasy biscuit thingy, I scrapped the idea of a pie and went with the straight up cobbler. And all's well that ends well! We loved the flavour combination and the cobbler topping was yummy - perfect for a sunday night in watching CSI (again with the terrible tv! I should stop confessing to such things).

So hop on over to Tracey's blog for the recipe and, as always, don't forget the other lovely ladies!

Rosy xx