It is a year filled with new promises, dreams and the next phase in food trends! We are seeing different foods from other cultures popping up all over. One of the top food critics predicted that this year’s favorite cuisine would be Austrian.

Another reported that Indian food was it!! The new dessert trend is the old fashioned comfort dishes like brown bettys, buckles, cobblers and crisps. These are the recipes our Nana passed down to us and we have been making for years.

Who new it would be the “it” dessert for this wonderful new year! Let me tell you a little about each one. A brown betty is usually made with apples and bread or graham cracker crumbs with layers of each.

A buckle is just a cake batter with the berries sprinkled in, and when baked the top actually buckles over the fruit. The cobbler has a fruit filling with a very thick crust, and the crisp is just that, a fruit mixture on the bottom with a very crispy crumbly topping.

Now I don’t know why, but Joy insists on adding her new twists to Nana’s recipes by adding things like exotic vanillas from across the globe, freshly grated fruit zests and beautiful sanding sugars from a fancy catalogue she subscribes to from California (she gets a little uppity about these things).

They really are all wonderful additions and the end result is truly amazing, but our mother just can’t understand why just she can’t make it the way Nana did. Why does she have to change it? It is all very amusing, very delicious and who knew Nana’s comfort desserts would be in the top 10 trends for 2010!

Violet’s Apple Cobbler

3 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 cup crisco

2 tsp vanilla (try Tahitian or Madagascar)

dash of salt (I used 1/4 tsp)

2 eggs

2 heaping tsp baking powder

2 cups apple filling (Nana used canned apple pie filling, she always said to add a dot of vanilla a little more cinnamon, then taste it!

sanding sugar (optional)

Garnish- Chantilly Cream

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

-Mix sugar and crisco add eggs and vanilla.

-In a separate bowl mix flour and baking powder and dash of salt.

-Add to creamed mixture and with beaters on low mix till mixture resembles course crumbs ( I usually walk away for some reason or another and end up making it into a dough, if this happens don’t worry it still works)

-Take out a 1/2 cup of mix and set aside for topping.

-grease a 9×9″ square pan and pat mixture into bottom.

-spread fruit mixture on top then using 1/2 cup saved batter, spatter it with pieces of mixture. If using sanding sugar, sprinkle over topping.

-Bake @325 till golden brown.

Chantilly Cream

1 pint heavy whipping cream (the fat content should be 35% or more)

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Chill the cream, the utensils, and bowl that you will be using.

2. Beat the cream at medium speed until soft peaks form.

3. Add the powdered sugar and vanilla extract and continue beating until stiff peaks form. Do not over whip.

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