I’ve always loved a fresh-fruit summer cobbler, even when called a buckle, crumble, crisp, Betty, or slump(!), but thought of them as a lot of work—or at least exceeding my “too much work” threshold—to be thought of as “convenient” or “fast.” No longer. This recipe is proving to be pretty fast, flexible (We are nothing if not flexible at Dad’s Recipe Box.), and reliable—almost resistant—to abuse. I’ve found a version that claims to be even simpler, but it doesn’t quite have the jazz that this one does.

Finding ourselves with some leftover fruit— two medium apples and two medium pears—we thought a good test of our new favorite dessert recipe would be to substitute these for fresh peaches. I’m going for canned peaches next. In the end, we could have used another pear or apple, but the taste was fantastic. I inadvertently over-baked the cobbler, so got caramelly sugar around the edges and a well-done, abundantly cakey crust, but this is all good, right?

This time, I also corrected an earlier mistake (I guess it was a mistake.) and instead of adding the milk to the baking dish just before cooking, I added the milk to the dry batter mix, per the actual recipe. The bottom line is that either method (I’m choosing to call these “methods.”) works just fine, apparently. In fact, the whole recipe forgives a lot of mistakes, substitutions, and “method” experimentation. Right up my alley.