Clafoutis: sweet batter pudding with fruit

This is the clafoutis straight out of the oven, before being sprinkled with sugar

Clafoutis, originally from the Limousin region, is traditionally a black-cherry batter pudding, but people use the same simple technique to make it with various kinds of fruit*. What makes it especially easy is that there's no pastry case: clafoutis is basically sweet Yorkshire pudding with fruit, a toad-in-the-hole with fruit where the sausages would usually be.

I do make it with cherries when they're in season, though in Paris cherries with any flavour aren't easy to find and if you find them you'll pay through the nose. I also make it with apricots, or in winter, pears. But this weekend a friend had given me a bunch of garden rhubarb, a fruit I can't resist, so I used that.

Typically, you need about 700 or 800g of fruit.

Begin early by cutting the rhubarb into chunks and mixing it, in a bowl, with 50g of sugar. I used demerara this time.

I also added a couple of tablespoons of vanilla-flavoured rum, as I had some to hand. (When using cherries, Kirsch is useful; with rhubarb, I reckon Cointreau or Grand Marnier might be nice.) But no alcohol is actually necessary and you don't often see it in published recipes.

Leave the fruit to steep in the syrup, at least half an hour.

Heat the oven to 200°C.

Into a mixing bowl, weigh 100g of flour and 100g of sugar and add a sachet of vanilla sugar and a good pinch of salt. Some recipes use more or less flour (60g to 150g), giving you a firmer or less-set pudding, depending. I stick to 100g.

(With pears, I might add cinnamon. Nutmeg is another option.)

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and whisk in three whole eggs. When the mixture is smooth, gradually whisk in 40cl of double cream (in France, crème fleurette). You can also add the syrup from the bottom of the rhubarb bowl. Keep beating: the more you beat it the more air will get in and the better it will be.

Arrange the rhubarb in a buttered, floured cake tin - I guess mine is 9 or 10 inches across. It's best if you have more than one layer of fruit. Pour in the batter.

Bake at 200°C for 40 minutes, and when you take the clafoutis out of the oven, sprinkle it immediately with sugar. If it was beaten enough, it will have risen quite a lot but will quickly deflate: this is normal!

I served mine last night at room temperature with crème fraîche. I'd thought about buying vanilla ice cream, but it was easier just to pick up a jar of crème fraîche while I grabbed the milk and cream at the supermarket: it was in the same cabinet.

*In which case, as a sweet little old lady in New York reminded me, it's sometimes called a flognarde or flaugnarde, or other names depending on the region and the fruit used. We also discussed stoning, or rather not stoning the cherries, which is traditional. I don't stone mine, but when serving, I do always warn guests that I haven't as otherwise they may crack their teeth.