Roasted Mixed Berries
Ingredients
- 600 g strawberries hulled weight, kept whole if small, cut in half if large
- 200 g frozen raspberries
- 200 g frozen berry of choice blueberries, blackberries, cherries, cranberries
- 2 tbls pure maple syrup
- 2 level tsp cornflour
- 2 tsp vanilla bean paste
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- Sprinkling of freshly cracked pepper
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees fan forced and place rack into middle of oven
- Place strawberries, raspberries and other berry of choice into a baking tray
- In a separate container mix together the maple syrup and cornflour ensuring that the cornflour has been fully amalgamated with the syrup ... pour it over the berries
- Drizzle over the vanilla bean paste, ground cinnamon and freshly cracked pepper and gently stir all the ingredients together
- Place baking tray into oven and bake for 15 minutes
- Remove tray and gently stir ingredients around and return to oven for a further 15 minutes
- Remove from oven and allow to cool before placing into a container and storing in the fridge
- Use as desired
Notes
I adore baked strawberries on their own, but I love them more when they are mixed with a couple of other berries too ... so I always use fresh strawberries, and then include frozen raspberries for their tartness, and add either frozen blueberries, blackberries, cherries or cranberries for variety.
When you bake fruits like this there will always be a lot of juice, particularly if the fruit is frozen. So to make that juice more "sticky" as it cools I add two level teaspoons of cornflour to the maple syrup before stirring it through the fruit. This works a treat creating a lovely thick sauce allowing the dish to resemble a thick compote of berries.
This dish can be prepared at least a couple of days before serving and can be used in so many ways: on pancakes, pavlova, as a layer in parfait glasses, on French toast, ice-cream, or even just as a fresh and fruity jam on some lovely sourdough toast. It also keeps well for up to a week in the fridge, but I honestly don't think it will be there that long ... do you?
To get the right balance of flavours it is important the amount of strawberries used is 600g hulled weigh, and to that you add 200g each of two other berries ... for me it is always raspberries along with one other, but it can be any type of berries you like.