Peach Clafoutis for a Pie-luck

I recently attended a pot luck pie social, dubbed a pie-luck, hosted by the Austin Food Blogger Alliance. Aside from getting together to eat pie, which is a perfectly fine reason in its own right, the pie-luck included a contest to determine the featured pie at a upcoming fundraiser for SafePlace, a local organization dedicated to ending sexual and domestic violence. The fundraiser, on August 21st at the Alamo Drafthouse, will involve more pie eating and a screening of the movie Waitress, which, coincidentally, features a lot of pie. Props to Micheal, over at Cooking for Engineers on his winning pecan pie. The fundraiser is a public event so if you're in the Austin area come out and join us and be sure to eat some of his delicious pie.

So what does clafoutis have to do with a pie-luck, you ask? Good question. The answer is not much, really. Basically, I didn't get it together in time to come up with a pie recipe for the contest but I wanted to attend the pie-luck and I didn't want to show up empty handed. Clafoutis was an easy choice.

One might say, easy as pie. I'd say easier.

Peach Clafoutis

adapted from Tartine 

Clafoutis is a great last minute dessert- it requires only a handful of ingredients, all staples, and it works well with a variety of fruit. I initially planned to make a blackberry clafoutis but when I didn't get to the store, the peaches I already had on hand served me well. I used the same recipe I've used previously, and subbed slices from 3 medium sized peaches for the cherries. I would also recommend subbing almond extract for the vanilla bean in this peach version. I discovered I was out of almond extract while making my clafoutis so I went with a vanilla bean but almond would be a better complement to the peaches. Also, although it is traditional to caramelize the crust on a cherry clafoutis, I skipped that step as I thought it would mask the flavor of the fresh peaches.