Last year, I taught a cooking class to about a half dozen children. On the first day, I taught them the technique for making pie crust, which they found fun and surprisingly simple. We made a broccoli quiche, from the wonderful book, Salad People. On the second day, we went out and picked berries and then made this roly poly. Because they knew how to make pie crust, this was an easy dessert to take home to their families!
Crust:
1 cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tbls. chilled butter
1/2 cup milk
3/4 cup blackberries
2-3 tbls. sugar
1 tbls. melted butter
Mix the dry ingredients. Cut the butter into small pieces and toss with the dry ingredients. Use both hands to crumble and squeeze the butter with your fingers, until it is mixed into uneven pieces. Using a fork, gently stir in the milk. Use your hands to bring the mixture together to make a dough. Knead it for a few minutes, until it is uniform.
Roll the dough out into a rectangle. (Sandwich your dough between wax paper, plastic wrap, or a silpat, and you’ll find the job easier.) Brush your doughy rectangle with melted butter. Brush a bread pan with the remaining butter.
Pour out the blackberries onto the dough and sprinkle with sugar. Roll up, starting with the short end of your rectangle. You may need to poke some berries that escape back in. Place your roly poly into the buttered bread pan. Bake at 350F for about 25 minutes.
If you’d like to make this with your children (or any children who you can rope into picking berries for you), here are some kid-friendly directions that they can read independently.
This recipe is adapted from the Wildwood cookbook, a good resource for eating seasonally.
I think you need to preface the link to that cookbook as a good source for eating seasonally IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. Don’t forget where you came from and don’t forget your fans still stuck here in the midwest!!! We may not have berries when you do, but we have fantastic tomatoes and we’ve had corn for weeks now, so there! :-)