Dutch Baby with Cinnamon Sugar Blueberries

A Dutch Baby is a simple but elegant breakfast with an egg batter that cooks in melted butter and is topped with cinnamon sugar coated blueberries. The blueberries, when poured onto the Dutch Baby straight out of the oven, warm through and become juicy and sweet.

A Dutch Baby is somewhere between a crepe, a pancake, and a soufflé , but it’s actually easier to make than all three. Butter is melted in a dish in the oven. Then the batter is poured in, put back in the oven, and you’re pretty much done. There’s no standing over the stove making multiple batches of pancakes or crepes or in the case of the soufflé, there’s nothing particular about making the batter like carefully whipping egg whites. For the Dutch baby you whisk all the ingredients together and pour it in the dish. That’s it.

A Dutch Baby can be made sweet or savory, and in this case I used a simple topping of cinnamon sugar coated blueberries. The blueberries do not require any extra cooking or fuss. Just toss them together with a little bit of sugar and cinnamon and pour it on top of the Dutch Baby straight out of the oven. The heat from the still hot Dutch Baby warms the blueberries through, and essentially cooks them so that they are warm and juicy and extra sweet. It’s a super simple way to make something look fancy and elegant for a weekend morning without much effort.

One other thing that I like about this dish is that the ratio of eggs to flour is pretty high. Unlike pancakes this dish is not all flour. A good portion of it is eggs, and while I won’t call this dish healthy (there’s a nice chunk of butter in there), it doesn’t leave you as empty feeling as pancakes sometimes do after an hour. Plus, it’s easy to heap on fruit to fill it out.

Notes:

• I like to use a round ceramic pie dish, but plenty of other things will work too. I’ve used a square ceramic baking dish before, or you could also use a cast iron skillet. Keep an eye on the timing and adjust if needed if you are using either glass or cast iron. Using a different material dish may affect the timing.
• Don’t open the oven until you’re ready to take it out. The Dutch Baby will rise around the edges and look very impressive when its first out of the oven, but it falls quickly. Opening the oven before its ready will affect that rise.
• Dusting the Dutch Baby with powdered sugar is entirely optional. It looks pretty, but is not necessary. It will still look beautiful and taste sweet.
• If you have a large group, or hungry kiddos, consider making two. This is enough to feed 4 people if you are having lots of extra fruit, coffee, etc, but if everyone is really hungry you could also easily eat more. Nowadays we make two of these for breakfast for us and our three young children. Even our 1 year old will eat a good portion of this.
• This also makes for a really nice afternoon snack. It could be a great thing to make as an afternoon snack while on vacation, like when you're all up from the beach or pool and looking for something warm and special to eat. It could also be great as an afternoon snack on a cold winter day. It would definitely make for special memories.
• The recipe calls for whole milk, but I've made it dozens of times with just 1% when we don't have whole milk in the fridge.
• The flowers in the picture are flowers that grow outside of the house that we are staying at in La Jolla, San Diego while on our one year trip around the country. I don't know what they are called, but they are beautiful and used as ground cover. They are frequently used in our kids imaginary play, and they love to give us and each other flowers. They seem to bloom year round. The front of the garden always has these little purple and white flowers. It's such a pretty option for the garden here. I imagine they wouldn't do well in a harsher climate, but we are enjoying them while we are here.