A delicious sweet dessert or nibble for any age group! But this is an especially great recipe for getting children involved in both cooking and also for creating their own lunchbox items. Even if kids are reluctant to try new foods it’s a great idea to get them involved in the process of preparing and weighing ingredients to help encourage interest in home-cooked food.
Wild fruit such as blackberries are ideal as they are so much fun to pick and offer an impressive amount of vitamin C plus both soluble and insoluble fibre. This dish can be made with either fresh or frozen blackberries.
Amazing recipe for amusing the kids, here my daughter lined up the blackberries SO carefully! Brilliant.
I’m running some kids workshops called Taste Explorers this autumn which will focus on experimentation with tastes, colours and texture of fruit and vegetables. More information on this soon. Sign up for my newsletter for updates.
Ingredients
250g self-raising flour
25g oats
140g soft brown sugar
140g ground almonds
200g cold butter cut into pieces
75g desiccated coconut
2 medium eggs beaten
300g frozen or fresh blackberry
Method
Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Tip the flour, oats, ground almonds and sugar into a large bowl. Rub the butter into the flour mixture using your fingertips until only small pea-size pieces remain. Stir through the coconut, then set a mug full of the mixture aside.
Stir the eggs into the bowl of mixture, then spread over the bottom of a lined baking tin (31 x 17cm), or a 21cm square tin. Smooth the surface with the back of a spoon, then scatter over the blackberries. Scatter over the reserved mixture and bake for 1 hr-1 hr 15 mins until golden and cooked through (if you poke a skewer in, it should come out with moist crumbs but no wet mixture). Leave to cool, then remove from the tin and cut into squares. Serve with some extra berries, if you like. So delicious!
Modified from a recipe on the BBC Good Food website.
I love to take a recipe then see how this would work with half the sugar. Here I substituted the 140g (half the called for sugar!) with ground almonds. Works well and so much more of a nutritious dessert with this change.