Easy Cherry Clafoutis #Recipe by @Donna_Fasano

Dictionary.com pronounces “clafoutis” as Klah-foo-tee and defines the dessert as “a tart made of fruit, especially cherries, baked in a thick, sweet batter.” I define is as absolutely delicious, and Cherry Clafoutis is the perfect way to use the beautiful cherries that are now in season. I believe home-cook-turned-TV-icon Julia Child first introduced this dessert to Americans after she had spent time living in France.

Cherry Clafoutis

I’ve seen recipes for this custardy fruit tart call for all different measurements of flour and sugar. Some recipes call for melted butter, others do not. I wasn’t sure which recipe was best. That’s why I decided to nail down this recipe for myself. The end result of the recipe below is a wonderful, fruit-filled, custardy delight that will have your friends and family screaming for another slice. You can serve this warm, at room temperature, or chilled.

Easy Cherry Clafoutis

  • 1 tablespoon butter for greasing the dish
  • 1 lb. stemmed and pitted fresh cherries
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 1/4 cup whole milk
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • Confectioners Sugar for dusting (optional)
  1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Use the 1 tablespoon of butter to grease the bottom and sides of a 10-inch quiche pan. Set the pan aside.
  2. Wash, dry, stem and pit the fresh cherries. For a tart filled with fruit, there should be 1 pound of pitted fruit for the tart so start out with over 1 pound. Add the cherries to the tart pan and spread into an even layer.
  3. Crack the 3 eggs into a bowl and beat with electric mixer until well combined. Add the sugar and beat for 1 minute.
  4. Add the 1/4 cup melted butter, heavy cream, milk, flour, salt, and vanilla extract to the egg mixture and beat until all ingredients are combined.
  5. Pour the batter over the cherries. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until the top is puffed and golden. The Clafoutis will deflate as it cools. Top with confectioners sugar if desired.

Feel free to substitute other fruit for the cherries—blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, sliced peaches, strawberries—any fruit that is in season. I have made this with frozen berries. The result tastes just as delicious. However, it isn’t as pretty as when using fresh fruit because frozen fruit tends to bleed its juices into the custard.

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This month, I’m celebrating Christmas in July by pricing my 3 holiday romances at just 99¢. I hope the books will help you ho-ho-ho your way through the rest of the month.

Donna Fasano Christmas

Her Mr. Miracle

An Almost Perfect Christmas

Grown-Up Christmas List

The best ice cream

At a time when everyone is going on a diet, I am almost embarrassed to admit I love ice-cream. I don’t particularly like cakes or dessert, but give me an ice cream and you’ll see a happy person.

The best ice cream I ever tasted left an indelible memory in my mind. We were in Rome, in front of the Fountain of Trevis—you know the famous fountain where you throw a coin to come back one day. I was hot and thirsty. When I saw the window of a Gelateria displaying scrumptious ice creams, I bought a gelato, as they call the ice cream in Italy. Oh my God, delicious, incredibly delicious. It had strawberries, chocolate, vanilla and whipped cream, stuffed with dried fruit. I asked for the name of that heavenly ice cream. They called it cassata Siciliana or cassata Napolitana, depending on whether the vendor was from Southern Italy or from Northern Italy.

Two days later, our cruise ship stopped in Sorrento. One of the waiters recommended a gelateria on the main piazza. “If you like ice cream, you can taste their cassata Siciliana,”  he said, bringing his bunched fingers to his lips and sending a kiss. “The best ice cream in the world.”

I didn’t need more convincing and led my husband straight to the gelato store.We each ordered a cone of cassata. My husband chocked at the price, $15 per cone.

But the store owner explained in broken English that his store was the Pope’s favorite gelateria. Apparently the Pope stopped here once to have a cone of cassata. Later, the owner built a St. Peter Basilica, made of cassata and presented it to the Pope. Of course, the picture was all over Italy’s newspapers and the owner showed us a copy on the wall with the pope receiving his pious ice cream. “So you capito perque cassata expensive?” the man added.

Si, capito, I understand why this cassata is so expensive.” Not that it reconciled my husband with the offensive price.

On the ship, the maître d’ gave me a recipe. The problem is that ice cream is loaded with calories and I am doing a terrible effort to watch what I eat and stay away from ‘dangerous’ food. I modified the recipe and used non-fat ice cream, or even better, frozen yogurt.

Cassata Recipe:

1-A pint of chocolate frozen yogurt containing dark chocolate chips.

2-A pint of strawberry frozen yogurt with frozen bits of strawberries.

3- A pint of mango ice cream with frozen bits of mangoes.

4- A box of non-fat whipped cream.

5- A pack of cut dried fruits, pineapple, papaya, raisin, coconut.

***The boxes of ice cream or frozen yogurt should be allowed to soften out of the refrigerator for half an hour before using.***

1-In an easy-to-open mold, spread the softened chocolate frozen yogurt evenly. Put in the freezer for two hours to harden.

2-Now spread the softened strawberry frozen yogurt evenly on top of the chocolate layer. Put in the freezer for two hours to let it harden.

3-Empty the bag of dry fruits in the box of whipped cream and mix well, then spread on the hardened ice cream in the mold. Leave in the freezer overnight.

4-Spread the softened mango ice cream evenly on top of the frozen whipped cream in the mold. Put in the freezer for two hours to let it harden.

**You can use mint chocolate instead of chocolate frozen yogurt, and pistachio ice cream instead of mango.

Take the mold out of the freezer half an hour before serving. Hold over a warm stove to loosen your ice cream from the bottom and be able to overturn the mold on a plate. Enjoy. Delicious and low calorie.

Shh…it’s a SECRET BABY…
Some parents would do anything for the sake of the kids they love.

Here’s your SPECIAL DELIVERY of SEVEN BRAND-NEW, NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED STEAMY STORIES from New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Authors.

SWEET and SASSY NEW BEGINNING

Whether best friends, co-workers, or strangers, these men and women struggle with roadblocks that pop up all around them.

Join us as these romances enlighten your reading time with miracles, poker games, hiding from the past, disabilities, political shenanigans, military tactics, and starting life over for a new lease on life.

From starting over to second chances, all these heroes and heroines are looking for one thing: A New Beginning.

DOCTORS IN LOVE DOCTORS IN LOVE 2

My Favorite Time of Year! #mgtab @NatalieAnn121

My Favorite Time Of Year!

What is your favorite time of year? Do you even have one?

In Upstate NY most people are begging for spring after a cold winter. But oftentimes we don’t get a spring and it jumps right into summer. That is how it seemed to happen this year.

There was a record number of days over 90 and we even hit 100 a few times. We had 4 days over 90 just last week and frankly, I’m sick of it.

But now it’s September and I’m looking forward to my favorite time of year.  Fall!!

Nice days and cool nights. Sleeping with the windows opened. Football Sundays and best of all apple picking!

It’s a tradition I’ve had with my son since he was a toddler. We’d go once in September, pick a big bag of apples and I’d come home and make apple sauce and his favorite apple cake. I only make it once a year since it’s such a rich decadent dessert.

I love Fall so much, I just released a new book this week, Autumn Love. It’s based around a beloved community’s apple orchard. When the orchard got to be too much for Ali Rogers’ mom to handle she decided to sell it. Liam Sullivan is a contractor that wanted to bring the orchard back to life and found that it’s more than a business venture when he falls for Ali. Add in Ali’s meddling grandfather’s ghost and it’s a great book to curl up with!

This story has so many things in it that I love personally and I hope that you will too. It’s just 99 cents, or FREE to read on Kindle Unlimited.

And if you want to try out my famous Apple Cake, here is the recipe for you!

3 cups of flour

4 teaspoons of cinnamon

2 teaspoons of nutmeg

1 teaspoon of baking soda

½ teaspoon of baking powder

3 eggs

2 cups of sugar

1 cup of oil

1 teaspoon of vanilla

4 cups of diced apples (no skin)

  • Mix all the dry ingredients together and set aside
  • Beat eggs, then add sugar and oil
  • Add vanilla and then the dry ingredients
  • Once all is mixed well, add the apples. Mix until blended, but not until the apples are broken up. Using the mixer will bring some of the juices of the apples out and make the cake extremely moist, but you still want to leaves some small chunks in it.
  • Pour into a greased 13 x 9 cake pan
  • Bake at 350 for an hour (test by sticking a toothpick in the center. If batter comes away, continue to cook until the toothpick is clean)
  • Frost with vanilla or cream cheese frosting
  • Cover and keep at room temperature for about a week

Enjoy!

Returning to a Place of Love

Beaubien Street, Greektown, Detroit, Michigan

 

The Greektown Detective Stories grew from my childhood memories of going to Greektown with my father to shop every Saturday. When I close my eyes, I can remember the sounds of traffic a few blocks over from quiet Greektown, the smells of bread baking, even the cool but sunny weather of a late spring morning. We never ate at the restaurants. My father was there to shop for ingredients he would use to prepare his favorite Greek recipes.

The apartment over Gus’s Greek Grocery in The Greeks of Beaubien Street belonged to my grandfather’s friend. The walnut dining room furniture with the picture of the Evzone in the ornate frame hanging over the buffet, and the tiny kitchen with the window overlooking the alley was a real place.

 

 

While other Greek families worshiped together, our family ate. My Aunt Zoola made the most phenomenal lamb roasts. Peeled potatoes were baked right in the juices and fat of the lamb giving it a leathery exterior with a fluffy interior.  We still talk about how wonderful they tasted. My father cooked Greek food on the weekends and the times I went with him to the Eastern Market for supplies are precious memories.  There was nothing more delicious than my dad’s Greek salad with fresh baked bread from Greektown.

My Papou author George Coutoumanos by Jane Simmonds

As a young girl the desire to belong was strong. I didn’t fit in with the white kids in our suburban neighborhood, and I longed to find my place there in Greektown. But my mother was English – a strike against me even in my father’s family where I didn’t feel totally accepted. My character, Detroit homicide detective Jill Zannos also doesn’t feel like she belongs in spite of being Greek and living in Greektown. She grows up in the apartment above the grocery store. My dad’s father ran a bar in a small, provincial town outside of Detroit, and the children felt the stigma of being Greek, and being bar owners.

 

The Greek community was insular in my memory. In the Greektown Stories, I expose issues that many modern Greeks find offensive, that they choose to ignore. There is a movement among some modern Greeks in America to only look at the positive. In my opinion, it’s the way tragedy is swept under the rug.  Some Greeks don’t like the issues I depict, saying Greeks

don’t act that way. But that’s not my experience. I love it when a reader validates the stories, able to identify with the situations.

 

In the preface of his beautiful book, My Detroit, Growing up Greek and American in Motor City (Pella Publishing Company, NY, NY, 2006) author Dan Georgakas writes, “…the Greeks who emigrated to America thought their citizenship would change, but not their basic culture. Somehow they would remain Greek, and their children’s children….” As a young girl, I was enthralled with anything that was remotely Greek. I longed to go to the Greek Church, but my family wasn’t religious. My grandmother said she’d give me $100 if I would learn the Greek alphabet, but there was no one to teach me. I’m smiling while writing this. The perspective of a child is so absolute. As an adult, I’m not religious and I still don’t know the Greek alphabet.

 

My family was Americanized. My grandmother, who I called Bunny instead of the Greek word, Yiayia, that my cousins used, was seven years old when she came to the United States. I found out later she studied at Wayne State University in Detroit. She married my grandfather who came to Greece as an adult, and they lived in Detroit until 1941, moving to the suburbs because even that long ago, she was frightened to raise her family in the city.

 

The only opportunity my grandmother had to speak Greek was to her father, my Papou (Greek for grandfather), or to her sisters. When my mother and the other non-Greek aunts were present, the aunts ignored them and spoke Greek. My mother said they’d add just enough English so the non-Greeks would know they were being talked about. I play with that dynamic a little bit in the Greektown books.

 

Bunny worked at keeping the family together.  In 1957, she bought a large, ancient farmhouse in Saugatuck, Michigan and spent the next year getting it ready for the extended family to enjoy. We’d drive in from Dearborn on Friday night and relatives from all over Michigan and from the Chicago area would converge. We’d spend the day at the beach, coming home tired and sunburned. The men stayed up all night playing poker, their laughter filling the old place. I can still smell the oregano from my grandmother’s kitchen.

The old farmhouse right before it was torn down.

After Bunny died, most of our relatives moved to California leaving us behind.  After that, my dad tried to continue the traditions that made our family Greek. It became even more important for him to hang on to some of the Greek ways, and for our family, since we didn’t go to the Orthodox Church, that meant Greek food and Greektown.  Rarely, Greek friends would come to the house but when they did, the food was phenomenal.

 

The Greeks of Beaubien Street is a work of fiction. I wanted the family to be more Greek than ours was, so I had to embellish what I knew from growing up in our mixed, Greek American family. The situations in the book are the complete opposite of my family’s. Yiayia Eleni in the story is critical and stern.  My grandmother was loving and kind, at least to me.  Although she was known to chase an errant child around the neighborhood with a switch she cut from a pussy willow tree, she never struck me. One of the last things my mother said to me before she died was that I reminded her of Bunny, something I will treasure forever.

 

Like Jill, I have a special needs sibling. In our youth, we referred to her as mentally retarded, a term which is no longer widely used. Now, when I hear the word retard used to describe a person, I cringe. My parents were pioneers during that time; they brought my sister home from the hospital instead of placing her in an institution, and she was mainstreamed into our community. Now in her mid-sixties, people from the old neighborhood still remember her and ask how she is.  My Greek relatives loved her and showered her with affection.  The shame and secretiveness of my character’s responses to their Down Syndrome child is foreign to us, thankfully.

 

I have not been to Dearborn or Detroit in over thirty years. The Detroit in the story is a conglomeration of the Detroit of my childhood, (when our mothers felt it was safe for twelve year-olds to take the bus in for shopping), and post-riot Detroit. Although I mention the riots and some of the desecration of the city, I do so only to keep things realistic.  I relied on aunts and uncles to fill me in on some of the trivia, like the story of the parrot who spoke Greek. My aunt remembers the parrot vividly from visits to Greektown with her father in the late 1940’s. Dan Georgakas also mentions the parrot. For a real view of Greektown, I highly recommend his book.  Everything else is a product of my imagination.

 

The memories of that time are powerfully influential. My husband and I moved from New Jersey to live in Saugatuck after our children were grown, and I felt close to my Papou, also an author, as I wrote The Greeks of Beaubien Street in my office overlooking the woods of west Michigan.

 

My detective stories set in Greektown Detroit, Michigan, are full of references to food. The family congregates around an old, walnut dining room table, eating the same food my family ate when I was growing up.

Readers asked me to compile a recipe book. I thought, why not? How hard can it be? Well, it was so far over my head, I quickly put the brakes on it and instead offered titles to the plethora of fabulous Greek cookbooks available.

One recipe however, is mine when I’m too lazy to make real Baklava, which I’d never attempt anyway.  This is a pretty cake, a big hit at potlucks, and takes very little effort.

Baklava Cake

Ingredients –

Yellow cake mix

White frosting

Walnuts to cover top of cake

Honey

Frozen Filo dough

Prepare the cake mix according to directions, divide into two pans.

While the cake is baking, toss walnuts with a Tsp. of oil and a pinch of salt, spread on a cookie sheet and roast, being careful they don’t get too dark. Chop coarse when cooled.

After removing the nuts from the oven, put several layers of semi-thawed filo dough prepared according to the directions on the box, into the oven to bake. It doesn’t take long. You’ll want the sheets to be light brown.

After the cake has cooled, assemble it, white frosting in between the layers with a drizzle of honey, but not too much, and a sprinkle of nuts. When the layers are stacked, cover with the white frosting.

Cover the frosted top with more chopped walnuts. Crush the filo dough into quarter-sized pieces. It’s easy to turn it into dust, so use caution here. Take the crushed baked filo and press it into the sides of the frosted cake. Drizzle with honey!

The crisp filo and salted walnuts are really nice with the super sweet frosting and honey. I use a light hand drizzling with the honey. Diners can always add more if they’d like.

Many fabulous Greek cookbooks are available. I love Around a Greek Table: Recipes & Stories Arranged According to the Liturgical Seasons of the Eastern Church

My favorite Greek Food Blogs

https://www.lemonandolives.com/

https://www.realgreekrecipes.com/

 

For more about my Greektown Stories, go here.