Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!
Fool me three times, and you’d better use blueberries.

The easiest way to enjoy foraged blueberries is to return home empty-handed, because you ate them as fast as you could pick them. One small step in the direction of sharing them with someone else might be to toss them into some pancakes. But if dessert is what you’re after, there’s a very simple (and very wonderful) way to turn them into one: the blueberry fool.

“Fool” is an English dessert. So, if a Brit ever calls you a fool, feel free to wonder if they’d like to have you for dessert. Same thing if they call you a tart.

This week, the Make It Like a Man! crew spent an afternoon picking wild blueberries, and decided to use them to create a mashup of our favorite blueberry fool recipes.

The first of our favorite recipes is by Martha Stewart. It calls for:

The sauce:

2 cups (1 lb) frozen wild blueberries, thawed, or fresh blueberries
2 Tbs fresh lemon juice (from 1 lemon)
Scant 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt

The cream:

2 cups heavy cream
3 Tbs sugar

Martha achieves a beautifully smooth texture in her fool. In the process, she discards the blueberry solids. We decided, based on preference and whim, that we wanted our fool to have more texture – something a bit closer to the fruit, more rustic than refined, more obviously related to pie filling. We should note, however, that the most traditional fool is indeed puréed, like Martha’s. The first time we followed her recipe, we were disappointed at how lemony the sauce tasted. However, genius that she is, the cream, once the two were paired, brought the sauce right back in line with utter perfection: brightening the berries to an eye-popping degree without asserting its own flavor.

The second of our favorite recipes comes from Fine Cooking.

This one isn’t a fool recipe. It’s a rustic blueberry sauce. However, it’s fool-ready; it just needs to be layered with cream. It calls for these ingredients:

3 cups fresh blueberries
1/3 cup raw sugar, such as demerara or muscovado, or packed brown sugar
2 Tbs crème de Cassis (black currant liqueur)
2 Tbs fresh lemon juice
Scant 1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon

What we love about this recipe is the texture of the finished sauce, and the flavor of the raw sugar.  We also love Cassis. Its dry and bitter notes – which are perfect in a glass of Kir – lent a world of complexity to this rustic sauce. But, again, we were looking for our fool to be stripped down, and all about the fruit.

Serious Eats, our third favorite recipe, has a comparatively large ingredient list:

The curd:

1/2 cup sugar
5 large egg yolks
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
2 tsp lemon zest
5 Tbs (2 1/2 ounces) unsalted butter, softened

The berries:

1 cup (5 ounces) fresh blueberries, plus extra for garnish
1 Tbs sugar
1 tsp fresh lemon juice

The cream:

1 cup chilled heavy cream
1/4 cup Greek-style yogurt

Having just said that we prefer a simpler fool, we couldn’t resist this one. Any excuse to eat lemon curd is a good excuse. Another thing we like about this recipe is the yogurt-whipped cream mix. It’s a fantastic combination that we like to use in many whip-centric desserts, such as Raspberries and Cheese. The yogurt adds tang and body to the whip without deflating it or weighing it down. What is rich and dreamy about whipped cream becomes downright luxurious. And stunning to behold.

Make It Like a Man’s Blueberry Fool

Here’s our mash-up. It takes the best of all three recipes, and gives you a simple yet elegant dessert that is one of the blueberriest experiences you’ll ever have.

Makes 4 large or 6 small servings

The berries:

2 1/2 cups blueberries
2 Tbs fresh lemon juice
Scant 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 cup raw or brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt

Place 2 cups of berries and all remaining ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat, stirring frequently. Lower heat and simmer until all the berries have burst and the sauce is mostly liquid, 8 minutes, scraping down the sides of the pan now and then with a spatula. Off heat, allow to cool. Stir in remaining raw berries. Refrigerate.

 The cream:

2 cups heavy cream
3 Tbs sugar

Beat until medium-soft peaks form.

Assembly:

4-6 Tbs lemon curd
2-3 Effie’s homemade oatcakes, crushed
4-6 Tbs fresh blueberries
4-6 tsp lemon zest

Divide the curd among the glasses. Sprinkle with 2/3 of the oatcakes. Divide 1/3 of the berry sauce among the glasses, and top with 1/3 of the cream. Run a butter knife gently through the berry-cream mixture, so as to slightly marble them. Repeat for two more marbled berry-cream layers. Scatter berries over the top layer of cream. Sprinkle on zest, then remaining oatcake crumbs. Serve immediately, or refrigerate for up to two hours.

Notes:

You can use the components of these recipes in many ways. Any one of the berry sauces would be wonderful on pancakes or the like. The curd-yogurt-cream mixture, marbled with any one of the blueberry sauces, would make a nice no-bake pie filling for a crust made from crushed oatcakes.

What makes the oatcakes perfect for this dessert is that they’re on the sweet side of savory. You could substitute graham crackers, although they wouldn’t be as delicious. You could substitute oatmeal cookie crumbs, or shortbread cookie crumbs, although they’d be much sweeter.

Blueberry Fool

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not solicited, nor written in exchange for anything. In the course of doing research for this post, I discovered, tangentially, that Dunkin’ Donuts Glazed Blueberry doughnuts, Blueberry Butternut doughnuts, and Blueberry Crumb Cake doughnuts do not contain blueberries. At all. They use an artificial “blueberry” that contains no fruit whatsoever. Speaking of blueberry fools, there’s a woman in Michigan who claims that she’s been feeding a family of twelve Bigfoots blueberry bagels for the past dozen years. But in all that time, she’s been unable to get a photograph. Hmm.

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