Down Home Slow Cooker Blackberry Dumplings
An old-fashioned summer treat that’s never gone out of style.
you're making mealtime meaningful.
One of my favorite late-summer activities has always been finding a large patch of wild blackberries and picking the warm, sun-sweetened fruit until my fingers are stained good and purple and my motley collection of containers (buckets and cups and random tupperware) can’t hold another berry. Then, we bring our bounty home and with what’s left after we’ve eaten our fill straight out of the containers, there’s cobbler, and maybe jam, and these simple Down Home Blackberry Dumplings. The slow cooker method used here is perfect for summer since it doesn’t heat up your kitchen, and the good news is that you can actually enjoy these any time of year and not just in the dog days of summer… frozen blackberries work just as well.
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of enjoying them, blackberry dumplings are tender little pillows of dough that cook in the simmering juices of blackberries. You eat the sweet dumpling and the hot, juicy blackberry sauce together with a little whipped cream or ice cream. It’s a dessert that feels old-fashioned and nostalgic, perfect for a warm summer evening.
These sweet dumplings only take ten minutes of effort on your part; the slow cooker does the rest. You just combine some blackberries with a little lemon juice and sugar in your slow cooker and set that on low or high depending on your time constraints and walk away.
In a couple of hours, you step back into your kitchen and mix together the dumpling dough, which is a quick hand-stirred combination of flour, sugar, milk, and baking powder. You drop spoonfuls of the dough into the now simmering blackberry sauce and close the crockpot back up to let them cook. The dumplings steam until they’re tender and infused with blackberry flavor. Add a scoop or two of ice cream, and you’ve got an ideal summer treat.
Slow Cooker Blackberry Dumplings
Yield(s): Serves 6-8
10 minutes active, 2+ hours inactive
you're making mealtime meaningful.
Ingredients
- For the blackberries:
- 3 cups fresh or frozen blackberries
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1/3 cup water
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- For the dumplings:
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup milk
- Ground cinnamon, as needed
- Whipped cream, for serving (optional)
Preparation
- Add blackberries, 1/4 cup sugar, water, and lemon juice to the insert of a 3 1/2 or 4-quart slow cooker and stir.
- Cover and cook on low for 3 to 4 hours or high for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. The mixture should be boiling.
- In a small bowl, mix together the flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, baking powder, and salt until well combined. Stir in milk just until flour mixture is moistened.
- Drop dough by spoonfuls onto hot berry mixture and sprinkle with cinnamon. Cover and cook on high until a toothpick inserted into the center of a dumpling comes out clean, 20-25 minutes.
- Note: Dumplings need steam to cook. Try not to lift the lid to peek at them!
Recipe adapted from The Southern Lady Cooks.