Pop over for a Popover!

On many occasions a coworker of mine suggests places that she thinks I will enjoy going to for a meal.  Consistently she would bring up one place on the upper west side of Manhattan that specialized in what she called a “popover”.  I had never heard of these “popovers” before but her description peaked my interest.  She described them being served with a small portion of strawberry butter and at this point her hands go in front of her mouth and fingers swipe down her face to show the deliciousness of a hot “popover” smothered in melting fruit butter.  You have to see her hand motions along with her description and you will understand how good she makes this place sound.

So one day a friend of mine from the neighborhood, out of the blue, suggests that we visit The Popover Café, on 86th and Amsterdam, for brunch.  Having heard so many great things from Ms. K, I jumped at the opportunity to go.  I have to say that the menu seemed typical of your local diner at brunch.  A bunch of egg things, a bunch of pancake, french toast things and the fruit platter and oatmeal things (does anyone ever order these?).  The food was good but each plate we ordered came with the legendary popover and strawberry butter.  They were definitely the highlight of our brunch.  The butter was outrageously good and melting over the eggy popover of course I had to order another. 

The popover at The Popover Cafe

So I figured, how hard can these things be to make.  I found a simple recipe for popovers on allrecipes.com and soon learned that a special pan known as a “popover pan” was needed for the recipe.  I would not be stopped by mere cookware so I prepared the recipe using a regular muffin pan instead.  I definitely did not get the height that all the photos of popovers I saw had.  However, I was able to get some pretty good results and because of the muffin pan I got double the amount of popovers the recipe called for. 

At this point I realized I did not have the required strawberries for the butter.  Really I can’t imagine eating these things without it.  So I simply substituted blueberries for strawberries in Martha Stewart’s strawberry butter recipe and I think it tasted better.  Very few, basic ingredients, really simple recipe, fantastic results it’s a win-win situation. 

I have to admit that although I did share some of them...I ate most of them myself!

Mix milk, flour, eggs, salt and melted butter 

Until it appears like heavy cream

The recipe says to cut chilled butter into six even pieces. However, for a muffin pan with 12 spaces I cut into 12

After popovers are in oven set timer for 20 min and start butter preparation

I halved the butter recipe and used blueberries instead of strawberries

Combine butter ingredients into electric mixer and blend

Blueberry Butter!

Popovers growing high ready to be removed from oven

Eat hot with blueberry butter

Eggy, Airy and Delicious!!!