Baking with berries - Berry hazelnut honey crisp

Summer is upon us and sadly we only have a few weeks left...but lucky for us Oregonians, we have a great berry season! Last year, I went berry picking at Rowell Bros. in Hillsboro, Oregon, but this year I headed to the farmlands at Crawford's Produce in Cornelius, Oregon. They have a stand at the Orenco Station Farmer's Market with all kinds of berries and other produce. So we headed out to the farm and ended up picking 12lbs of berries, including blackberries, boysenberries and blueberries!

My craving for berries came from a Blackberry hazelnut honey crisp recipe that I found in Sunset Magazine! It looked fabulous...so I found a similar recipe online and improvised (if you have read my blog before, you know I like to find multiple recipes and make my own creation).

Find the full recipe here, but below are the ingredients and my modifications:

• 1 1/2 cups fresh blackberries
• 1 1/2 cups fresh raspberries (I used boysenberries) 
• 1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
• 4 tablespoons white sugar (I used wildflower honey to sweeten instead) 
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 cups butter

PLUS - add 1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts to the mixture. YUM! 

This recipe was delicious and did not take long at all! As usual, it was easy...because I like simple and quick recipes.

It is a great dessert for a dinner party or a summer BBQ. I prepped it in the pan ahead of time and then after dinner I put it in the oven 30 minutes and it was ready to go! Have it with some homemade whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Do you have any great berry recipes you love? I still have about 8 more pounds of berries to use :)

It is berry season in Oregon!

So in my last post I said that the weather and beer festivals were my favorite parts of summer...but I have to tell you, berry picking is right up there too. Since I drive to Newberg at least five times a week for work, I drive by all the berry farms and fruit vendors and it makes me crave fresh raspberries every time. So, I decided on my day off I would take my sisters berry picking. We tried recruiting some other people, but apparently to them, picking berries is a chore. They are all crazy.

After we gathered up our containers, we headed out to Rowell Bros on SW Scholls Ferry Road, just ten minutes outside of Beaverton. Each year we try and visit a new berry farm and so far we have had good luck at all of them. I drove by Rowell Bros a few weeks ago and it looked like the perfect stop.

Rowell Bros had so many different types of berries too, not just raspberries. They had Coho Red Raspberries, Logan Berries, Marionberries, Siskiyou Blackberries, Boysenberries and Blueberries.There were rows and rows of them! Most all the berries are only $o.99 a pound too.

We started with the raspberries, then marioberries and last blackberries. No one really eats blueberries in our family, so we skipped those. My sister Haylie was a pro at picking them, probably picking like 30 berries a minute. My other sister Kenzie was the opposite, she lost interest after about fifteen minutes. She ate more berries than she picked. Real helpful, but I guess she offered some good entertainment.

We had a great time and picked quite a few in just an hour. All those berries for only $17!

I suggest going to check them out and bring your own container, it saves you a couple bucks!

Rowell Bros
24050 Sw Scholls Ferry Rd Hillsboro or 97123
Open Mon- Sun from 9am - 6pm
U-Pick or They-Pick