Blueberries with Vanilla Cream

Blueberries...did you know that there is a gigantic poem by Robert Frost all about blueberries? Here's a teeny piece of it.

"You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!"


(And you thought all you were getting on this blog was recipes!) Anyway, I am not at all surprised, because if any fruit deserves its own poem, it's the blueberry. I love them, I love them, I can't stop piling them into my cart at the local farm market...

And while they are amazing in everything from muffins to blueberry cobbler bars, sometimes you just want to eat a pile of them plain...or maybe with just a little vanilla cream sauce, perhaps?

Okay, maybe a LOT of vanilla cream sauce.

Maybe we what we are talking about is not eating blueberries with vanilla cream sauce, but vanilla cream sauce with some blueberries.

This recipe comes from the always awesome Pioneer Woman, so when you drink down the whole bowl of this decadent sauce with your berries, you can blame her, not me. By the way, her recipe shows this sauce with blackberries...and I am sure it would be just as good on strawberries. So whatever sort of berry person you are...cream sauce. Yum.

Blueberries with Vanilla Cream, adapted from The Pioneer Woman

• 1 pint Heavy Whipping Cream
• 1 cup Sugar, Divided
• 10 whole Egg Yolks (save The Whites For Another Use)
• 2 teaspoons Good Vanilla Extract
  
• Fresh Berries

Combine cream with half the sugar in a medium saucepan. Bring to a strong simmer, but don’t boil.

Whisk egg yolks in a bowl with the other half of the sugar. Add vanilla extract.

After whisking on medium for a minute, begin slowly pouring in the hot cream.

After all cream is added, turn off mixer. Pour mixture into the top of a double boiler (or a glass bowl fitted over a saucepan). Cook in the double boiler over medium heat. Stir gently but constantly as the egg/cream mixture slowly thickens.

Watch the mixture: if it starts to really thicken up, remove it immediately from the heat. You want this to be more of a thick, pourable cream than a thick, heavy pudding texture. As soon as you remove the pan from the heat, set the bottom of it in a bowl of ice to stop the cooking process (but be careful not to let ice or water drip over the edge of the pan.) Stir to cool. If you need to use the cream right away, keep it in the ice bath and stir to cool.

Transfer the cream to a container and refrigerate it for several hours before serving.

Click here for printable recipe