Cherry Chocolate Cobbler

My mama’s thirty-ninth birthday was Thursday January twenty-sixth. I want to put it on the page in pen because Mama’s birthdays usually pass quietly in this house, and this one I had been planning for a month, and it deserved the kind of attention I had been planning to give it.

I want to write down what I know about Mama and birthdays. Mama was born January twenty-sixth, 1978, in a small house off Lakewood in Broken Arrow, the second of Grandma Carol and Grandpa Earl’s two daughters. (Aunt Tammy is the older one, by four years.) Mama grew up with the kind of birthday that poor families have, which is to say with a homemade cake and one small gift and the family at the table for an hour. Mama’s favorite combination since she was a kid has been cherry and chocolate. Grandma Carol used to make her a cherry chocolate ice cream cake from chocolate ice cream and crushed Oreos and a can of cherry pie filling, layered in a 9-by-13 and frozen, and Mama has talked about that cake with the kind of voice that does not get talked over since I was seven years old.

So I have been waiting to make her a cherry chocolate dessert for years. The cherry chocolate cobbler from Mel’s Kitchen Cafe was a recipe I copied out two months ago specifically because of the cherry-chocolate combination, and I have been holding it for the birthday, and the birthday came, and the cobbler happened.

The math: a 21-ounce can of cherry pie filling, $1.99 at Walmart. One box of chocolate cake mix, $1.49 from the bottom shelf at Walmart (the cheap house-brand version, which is the kind most cobbler recipes call for and which works fine). Three tablespoons of butter melted, $0.30. A cup of milk from the fridge, $0.30. Two eggs, $0.16. A teaspoon of vanilla extract, salt from the rack. Total cost: about $4.30 for a 9-by-9 pan that fed Mama and me for three desserts on big servings.

The technique is the stir-and-pour kind, which is the easiest kind of cobbler. You butter a 9-by-9 baking pan and spread the cherry pie filling across the bottom in an even layer. You whisk the chocolate cake mix in a bowl with the melted butter, the milk, the two eggs, and the vanilla until smooth and thick — the batter is thicker than a regular cake batter because there is no extra oil. You pour the chocolate batter over the cherries, spreading gently with a spatula to cover them, but do not stir. You sprinkle a pinch of salt across the top. You bake at 350 for thirty-five minutes.

What happens in the oven is the magic of a cobbler. The cherries bubble up. The chocolate batter rises around them. The top sets into a deep brownie-like crust with cherry-colored pockets where the fruit has come up through the batter. The bottom layer of cherries stays soft and saucy. The middle is the most chocolatey part. The whole pan smells, when it comes out of the oven, like a brownie factory and a cherry pie merged into one place, which is the smell of my mama’s birthday in some kitchen in some year I never saw.

I served it Thursday night at seven-fifteen. Mama came home from her shift at six-fifteen. The kitchen smelled like the cobbler from the moment she walked in the door. She stopped in the doorway. She said, Kaylee Dawn, what have you done.

I had cooked her favorite weeknight dinner first — chicken pot pie, with the homemade all-butter pie crust I have gotten good at this fall, filled with chicken thighs and the bag of mixed frozen vegetables I keep in the freezer for exactly this kind of thing, in a creamy roux-bechamel-broth sauce that I have learned to make from a hundred Tuesday nights. We ate the chicken pot pie at the kitchen table for an hour. Mama had two helpings. The crust was buttery and flaky. The filling was hot and rich and had pieces of carrot and peas and the soft chicken that has cooked in the broth.

And then I brought out the cobbler. I had stuck a single candle in the top because we did not have thirty-nine candles and we did not need them. I lit the candle. I sang the birthday song to my mama. She closed her eyes. She blew out the candle. The kitchen was warm and the radio was on quiet and the kitchen window had a thin layer of condensation on the inside because the kitchen had been running the oven for ninety minutes.

Mama opened her eyes. She said, thirty-nine, baby. I do not feel thirty-nine. I said, well, you look thirty-five, Mama. She laughed. She said, flatterer. I served her a big square of the cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream from the Aldi freezer aisle ($2.99 for the cheap half-gallon, which is what we have always used for birthdays in this house). The ice cream melted into the warm chocolate. The cherries bled red into the cream. Mama ate the whole serving and went back for half of another one.

I want to put one more thing on the page before I close the entry. I drove to the Tulsa County Youthful Offender Unit on Saturday morning for the second visit, and I had brought a small Tupperware container of the leftover cobbler in the trunk of the Cavalier on the off chance the visiting officers would let me bring it in for Cody. They did not. The rules say no outside food. The officer at the lobby desk was apologetic when she told me, and I said, I understand, ma’am, and put the Tupperware back in the trunk. We had the visit anyway. Cody asked about the birthday. I told him about the cobbler. He laughed. He said, save me a piece of chocolate cake, Kay. I will eat it in twenty-two months.

I am going to. I have decided I am going to bake him a cherry chocolate cobbler the day he comes home, in November of 2018, and we are going to eat it at the kitchen table, the three of us, and the chair is going to fill up again, and the X marks I have stopped keeping on the wall are going to have done their work whether I marked them or not. Twenty-two months. That is the project.

The basil plant on the windowsill is still alive. The pan that the cobbler came out of is washed and back in the cabinet. Mama wore her birthday glow into bed Thursday night and I heard her humming for a few minutes through her bedroom door, which is a thing she has not done in years.

The recipe is below, the way Mel’s Kitchen Cafe wrote it. The trick I want you to keep is the no-stirring — do not stir the chocolate batter into the cherries; pour and spread gently and let the layers stay separate, because the magic of the cobbler is that the layers move on their own in the oven. Make this for somebody’s birthday. Stick a single candle in it. Serve warm with cheap vanilla ice cream. The recipe holds the kind of weight a birthday cake is supposed to hold.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 40 minutes | Total Time: 55 minutes | Servings: 9

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar, divided
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, plus 2 tablespoons, divided
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 can (21 oz) cherry pie filling
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup boiling water
Vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, for serving (optional)

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 9x9-inch baking dish and set aside.
Make the batter. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/4 cup cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the buttermilk, melted butter, and vanilla until a thick, smooth batter forms. Spread evenly into the prepared baking dish.
Layer the cherries. Spoon the cherry pie filling evenly over the chocolate batter, spreading gently to the edges.
Add the topping. In a small bowl, stir together the remaining 1/4 cup granulated sugar, brown sugar, and remaining 2 tablespoons cocoa powder. Sprinkle the mixture evenly over the cherries.
Pour the water. Carefully pour the boiling water over the entire dish. Do not stir — this step creates the fudgy, self-saucing layer underneath as it bakes.
Bake. Bake uncovered for 38–42 minutes, until the top is set and a toothpick inserted in the cakey portion comes out mostly clean. The bottom will remain saucy and rich — that’s exactly right.
Rest and serve. Let the cobbler rest for 10 minutes before serving. Scoop into bowls and top with a spoonful of the warm chocolate sauce from the bottom of the pan. Serve with ice cream or whipped cream if you’d like, but it doesn’t need it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Cherry Chocolate Cobbler — My Mama’s Thirty-Ninth Birthday Cake