Mystery Lovers' Kitchen: summer desserts

Libby Klein My favorite dessert is fruit. Not righteous fruit that your nutritionist would get excited about. But lightly sugared fruit baked in a crust or topped with a crumble. Then add some ice cream on top and you've got a winner. I'll eat a plain peach or some berries at lunch time but that isn't dessert.

Blackberry cobbler is a summer favorite. Probably because I remember my mother making one on top of the stop when I was a kid. Hers was kind of chicken n dumplings style, while mine is more traditional - until I do something crazy with it! You'll have to come back and see how I turn cobbler and ice cream on its head.

Make sure your berries are very ripe. Nobody likes sour cobbler. Let me know in the comments what your favorite summer fruit dessert is.

Summer Blackberry Cobbler

serves 8

Ingredients

½ cup coconut sugar (or granulated sugar)
2 tablespoons cornstarch
6 cups fresh blackberries
¼ cup unsalted butter, melted (or refined coconut oil for dairy free)
2 1/2 cups gluten-free flour (or all purpose)
1 1/2 cups coconut sugar (or granulated sugar)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups milk (or dairy free alternative)
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted (or refined coconut oil for dairy free)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a 9x13-inch baking dish.

Place blackberries into a mixing bowl and drizzle with melted butter. Sprinkle cornstarch and sugar over top, then toss until evenly coated. Add to the baking dish.

In another mixing bowl: Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together. Stir in milk, melted butter, and vanilla until combined but still slightly lumpy like pancake batter. Pour over the berries in the baking dish.

Bake in the preheated oven until berries are tender and the crust is golden brown, 55 to 60 minutes.

Serve with vanilla ice cream – or – come back at the end of the month and see what I do with the cobbler next!

Gluten-free baker Poppy McAllister and her aunt Ginny are looking forward to a quiet, homey Christmas at their B&B in Cape May, but unfortunately, death isn’t taking a holiday this year . . .

Ever since Thanksgiving, Poppy and her pals have been left with an unsolved mystery of the romantic kind. But at least this mystery isn’t the kind that involves murder. That all changes when the body of a fish supplier is discovered in the kitchen of her ex’s restaurant—and he’s frozen, not fresh.

For once, it’s not Poppy who tripped over the corpse, yet she can’t escape being drawn in since the victim has a note taped to him reading Get Poppy. Figures—an engagement ring isn't labeled, but the dead guy is addressed to her. Now, while Aunt Ginny plans a tree-trimming party and pressures Poppy to decode a mysterious old diary, the amateur sleuth is asked to “unofficially” go undercover at the restaurant to help the police. Until then, the only crime Poppy had been dealing with was Figaro’s repeated thefts of bird ornaments from the tree; now it looks like it’s going to be a murder-y Christmas after all.

Libby Klein grew up in Cape May, NJ where she attended high school in the '80s. Her

classes revolved mostly around the Culinary sciences and Drama, with one brilliant semester in Poly-Sci that may have been an accident. She loves to drink coffee, bake gluten-free goodies, collect fluffy cats, and translate sarcasm for people who are too serious. She writes from her Northern Virginia office where she serves a very naughty black smoke Persian named Sir Figaro Newton. You can keep up with her shenanigans by signing up for her Mischief and Mayhem Newsletter on her website. www.LibbyKleinBooks.com/Newsletter/

From Cleo Coyle: Today I'm sharing an easy way that Marc and I make light, frozen yogurt snacks for summer. It's also a wonderful way to make use of yogurt that might be approaching its expiration date in your fridge.

Before we begin the recipe, however, we'd like to share this happy news with our readers. We recently heard from our publisher that our 8th Haunted Bookshop Mystery, THE GHOST AND THE STOLEN TEARS, is now in a second printing!

Click here or on the image above for a free checklist of all 9 "Jack and Pen" Haunted Bookshop Mystery titles with mini plot summaries.

We're now writing the next book in our "Jack and Pen" series of Haunted Bookshop Mysteries. (More news soon on the new adventure.) Until then, click here for a free checklist of all nine titles thus far. They're wonderful fun, but don't take our word for it...

Criminal Element called them "relentlessly entertaining," Kirkus delcared them "delightful," Mystery Scene "utterly charming," Fresh Fiction "amazing and unique," and fans say they make great summer reading.

🍓 Now let's get our frozen yogurt bites on!

Cleo Coyle writes two
bestselling mystery
series with her husband.
To learn more, click here.

🍓 A Recipe Note from Cleo

While we've had a temperate June here in New York City, Marc and I know the high heat and humidity will soon be sapping the life out of us, so frozen treats like these will be much appreciated.

Whether it’s hot or not where you are, these pretty little Strawberry Shortcake Frozen Yogurt Bites are incredibly easy to make. They’re relatively light on the calories, too.

Because of the many combinations possible with flavors and add-ins, there is foodie fun to be had in creating these babies. It's also a part of our "Waste not!" philosophy since (as I mentioned above) it's a great way to make use of fruit yogurts in your fridge that may be approaching their expiration dates.

Stay cool, everyone, and eat with joy!

~ Cleo

To download this recipe as a
free PDF that you can print,
save, or share, click here.

Click here for the free recipe PDF.

🍓 Cleo's Strawberry Shortcake

Frozen Yogurt Bites

Makes 12 frozen bites

You will need:
1 mini muffin pan (with 12 cups)
12 mini paper liners

Ingredients:
1 six-ounce container (or 1/2 heaping cup) of strawberry yogurt
1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon sweetened condensed milk (low-fat is fine)
A few strawberries
12 Nilla wafers (regular or reduced fat) or see "optional crust" note below...

OPTIONAL CRUST: Another option for a "cookie crust" is your basic graham cracker crust: Combine 1 package graham crackers (that's about 9 "boards" or 1-2/3 cups crumbs) with 1/4 cup granulated sugar. Add in 1/3 cup melted butter. Press crumb mixture into bottom of paper lined muffin cups.

RECIPE NOTE: The amount of sweetened condensed milk in this recipe works out to exactly 1/4 of a typical 14-ounce can. If you'd rather use up the entire can at one time, simply quadruple this recipe: that is, use 4 six-ounce containers of yogurt (or 2 heaping cups) and 48 Nilla wafers. You can certainly have fun with multiple flavors if you do this, dividing up the can of milk into four bowls and using four different flavors of yogurt.

DIRECTIONS:

Step 1 - Stir together the yogurt and sweetened condensed milk. Slice up the fruit, add, and stir. (How much or how little fruit or other items you add is up to your own taste.) Set aside in refrigerator.

Step 2 - Prep cookie crust: The easiest "cookie crust" to use here is a Nilla wafer that's whittled down with a paring knife to fit the cups in your mini muffin pan. (See my photo.)

NOTE: The resulting cookie crumbs from Step 2 can be used as a tasty topping for these frozen treats, so be sure to save them for the final garnish.

Step 3 - Prep pan: Drop each whittled down Nilla wafer into a paper-lined mini-muffin cup.

OPTIONAL CRUST: If using a homemade graham cracker crust, press crumb mixture into bottom of paper lined muffin cups.

Step 4 - Freeze and finish: Spoon the yogurt mixture into each cup. Place in the freezer for at least two hours. If freezing longer, cover the pan with plastic wrap.

Before serving, you can pretty up the cups by adding a slice of fruit on top with a tiny shot of whipped cream and a final garnish...