Baking In The Sweet Scent Of Summer

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

I don’t bake much these days. This poses a problem at times like these where a whiff of a ripe Georgia peach at the market is enough to send my head spinning in nostalgic longing for a crusty biscuit topped cobbler. Or the sight of a pile of apricots takes me back to faraway place where my younger self scrambled up a neighbor’s tree to collect the small fuzzy fruit. A paper bag bulging with our collection would form a week’s worth of cake-topped puddings and afternoon snacks on lazy summer days.

Clearly there was a time when I did bake. Like many a hungry youngster, I learned to cook by observing the women in my life, peering over the counter edge while my mom baked our weekly loaves of whole wheat bread and whipped up nutritious dinners. As much as my mother was the main influence in my life when it came to the kitchen, it was really with my great grandmother where I learned the old fashioned ways of baking. Chicken and dumplings, flaky homemade pie crust, mile high meringues, lemon curd, and of course cookies. My great grandmother Nadine’s style of baking was straight out of the pages of a Fannie Farmer Cookbook: good old fashioned kitchen know-how stirred up with a dose of California fresh produce and a little, no, a lot of butter.

My problem with baking today is really an issue of quantity. Unlike my childhood where there were always at least six mouths eager to feed on whatever was fresh from the oven, today I am a party of one, maybe two (my boyfriend is not much of a dessert eater). So most of those dishes I learned to cook in my early years from towering apple pies with crumb crusts to rich, luscious cheesecakes no longer work in my current environment. Either I make a full pie recipe and watch half of it go to waste, or I make a whole recipe, overeat, and feel guilty for days.

But with the peaches as succulent and juicy as they are this year I simply could not hold out any longer. The solution I realized, was finding a recipe that would make the most of the fruit in a quantity reasonable for a household of two with maybe a few leftovers.

Dusting off my favorite 8-ounce ramekins, I thought they might be the ideal size for baking individual cobblers topped with a puffy biscuit crust. The fruit right now needs so little, all I needed to do was give the peach slices a turn on the stove with light sugar syrup and some ginger slices for ten minutes until they started to melt and their juices thickened. Meanwhile I mixed up a quick buttermilk and cornmeal biscuit, wetter than I would do for a breakfast food, enough that the batter needed to be simply patted into a rough round and placed on top the ramekins once I filled them with the peach mixture.

Eighteen minutes later my apartment was fragrant with the intoxicating mix of one of summer’s sweetest fruits with the aromatic twist of fresh ginger. There was one dish for me, one for my boyfriend, and two leftover for a decadent breakfast the next morning. Just the right amount.

Serves/Makes: 4

***Peaches***

• 1 piece (1 inch size) fresh ginger, peeled and cut in quarters
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 4 large peaches

***Biscuit Topping***

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup cornmeal
• 1/2 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 5 tablespoons very cold butter
• 1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger
• 1/2 cup buttermilk, plus extra as needed
• 2 teaspoons turbinado sugar or brown sugar