“Mummy, whatever you’re baking in here, it smells *awfully* good”. With that ringing endorsement from C, here beginneth the journey of Baking Across America and a peach cobbler from Georgia. That is, as close as one can get when one lives in Brisbane and has zero access to Georgia peaches. However it is that they differ from Alabama peaches or Queensland peaches.

One of my Christmas presents from Glenn was B. Dylan Hollis’ book, Baking Across America. I have been devouring it whenever I can ever since. With books like this, I love to then make the recipes – I mean, duh. But in a methodical fashion, rather like Julie and Julia but without the stress. Being me, I would normally start at the beginning and be orderly about it. However, each area contains recipes with summer fruits and recipes without, and I know if I went through systematically I would give up fairly quickly from dejectedness over lack of ingredients. As it is, I have already sent my husband out searching for fresh cranberries without success and I will be taking girls with me for a full-on excursion in quest of them at some point. Peach cobbler was chosen because peaches and Brisbane summer seemed quite doable.

I ordered a box of imperfect peaches and let them ripen a tad, which meant that some of them did that weird thing of having foul spots while still being hard. Still, I washed eight instead of the instructed five and was glad I did. One was wonky on the inside, and two of them were tiny, so I figured this amounted to about the amount of five Georgia peaches. With girls watching Nightmare Before Christmas and Glenn relaxing on his sofa, I set to work and was instantly in a happy place. It has been a long time since I baked a dessert, or baked anything from a recipe book that was not for the purpose of lunchbox snacks or freezer snacks. Methodically slicing peaches and removing the flesh from the stone and transferring to a saucepan and repeating the process, knowing that this would turn into a tasty dessert, was an instant endorphin rush. I must do so more often.

This turned out to be a “trust the process”, er, process. I should probably point out here that I think I have both made and eaten cobbler once in my life before, and not any time recently. So my knowledge of cobbler process is limited and vague and reaching back a long, long way into my memory. Still, I expected peaches then batter, instead of melted butter then batter then peaches and juices then sugar, in a process that looked shockingly wrong and rather unphotogenic. Trust the process. Because, as I was fairly confident would happen, what looked entirely ugly and as if I had most definitely read the instructions entirely incorrectly, turned out to be exactly what it ought to be. A peach cobbler. Lovely soft cinnamon sugar peaches amid blobs of sweet batter. 

A surprise, though, was the ultimate in jammy goodness hiding in sporadic pockets beneath the dough. We’re talking not just scooping out as much as possible for the next serving, but letting out an actual gasp of delighted surprise followed by furtive side eyes so as to sneak more of it. It was almost black, and it was camouflaged with the spots of stickiness that had to be worked to the extent that I felt my arms had earned another serve, and it was amazing. 

Furthermore, this was one of those desserts that seemed to be a new creation the following day. I let the girls have a serve (with ice cream!) for morning tea. When cleaning up, I had a morsel of peach and ohmygoodnessme it had caramelised and gooeyfied and … I just can’t. It was glorious.