Recipe: Blackberry Crisp

As you've seen from my previous posts, after picking blackberries all last week, I needed to do something with them. I made blackberry muffins, blackberry scones, and now it was time to make a blackberry crisp.

This was another recipe that my mom had found in a magazine (not sure which one). The original recipe is for blueberries instead of blackberries, but it's all the same!

Ingredients

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons flour
• 1.5 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 jumbo egg
• 2 pints fresh blueberries (blackberries)
• 1 stick butter, melted

Directions

1. Grease, butter, or spray a 2-inch-deep round baking dish. Heat oven to 350°F.
2. Mix together 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of sugar, baking powder, and salt. Beat egg and add it, in increments, to the flour mixture, stirring and crumbling with fingers until it resembles coarse meal. (It may take all of the egg to reach this stage.). Set aside.
3. Wash and drain berries. Pick off stems and eliminate any unripe berries. Place in a bowl. Combine remaining .5 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons flour. Sprinkle over berries and mix thoroughly. 
4. Fill prepared baking dish with berries and spread crumb mixture evenly over top. Drizzle with melted butter. 
5. Bake for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

I really wish Step #2 had been broken into two separate steps. I was just about to add the egg into the flour like with a regular recipe, and my mom had to stop me to read out how I had to beat the egg first, then add it in slowly, AND get my hands messy (which I hate). Why wasn't the egg listed as "1 egg, beaten" in the ingredients?! But she caught me before it was too late, so that was okay. (BTW, one large egg is the same as one jumbo egg for recipes. And by the sounds of this recipe, you wouldn't even have to use all of it.)

There were a few changes I might make. For one, that melted butter at the end: one stick is A LOT of butter. The crisp part was delicious, but I think it would have been just as good with 1/2 or 3/4 of a stick of butter. The berry part itself was a little soupy, so I wonder if adding some corn starch in the berry mixture would have been a good idea. All in all though, I was very happy with this dessert!