Piña Colada Cobbler

a tropical spin on a classic summer cobbler with a coconut crumb topping and coconut rum caramel

I consider my heritage “Southern Italian”. My dad’s family emigrated from Sicily in the early 1900s, settling in West Virginia with my grandparents eventually settling Florida and my dad and all of his brothers and sisters making their way to North Carolina. My mom’s family has been in North Carolina basically forever (or at least hundreds of years). Most of the recipes that I love and remember from growing up are some sort of amalgamation of the two—Italian recipes or Southern recipes or some sort of Southern Italian mish-mash. We take BBQ very seriously and also make homemade Italian sausage. It’s a fun balance.

So when researching cobblers, all of the literature on the internet comes back with hearty biscuit toppings and that wasn’t the cobbler that I remembered growing up with. The cobblers from my childhood were topped with a thick cake-like topping, that oozes down and mingles with the fruit while baking, creating pockets of gooey centers and golden crispy edges. I reached out to my mom, my grandma, and a few of my aunts to see if their memories were the same. Yes, our cobblers have always leaned more towards a cake and less like a biscuit so I wanted to start there.

For this recipe, I sought out to channel a rustic version of a pineapple upside down cake—all those sticky, caramel-y flavors but in a classic summer cobbler. My dad’s sister Karen subscribes to the NYT Cooking print version, creasing and saving recipes to try at her next dinner party, and cooks from splattered copies of classic cookbooks. She shared with me that her go-to cobbler (crumble) topping is from Alice Water’s and she makes a big batch to keep in the fridge all summer long, sprinkling handfuls over whatever fruit she brings home from the market. (And sure enough, she emailed me a picture of a well-loved page from a cookbook that I’m certain has its home right on her kitchen counter.)

When I was in middle and high school, I remember my Aunt Jennifer (my mom’s sister-in-law) making a perfect peach cobbler for most family get togethers. I texted her asking if she still had her recipe and she sent me a photo of a little recipe card with the famed peach cobbler recipe, passed down to her from her grandfather’s sister. (And their family is from Georgia so I feel like they can definitely be trusted when it comes to peach cobbler.)

I used those two recipes as my jumping off points, smushing them together and adapting to create a cobbler recipe that felt familiar and also new and exciting. For the filling, I combined browned butter with a little brown sugar, a splash of coconut rum, and a bunch of frozen pineapple and then topped the fruit with a rendition of Jennifer’s cobbler topping. I adapted the Alice Water’s recipe to create a coconut crumb that was strewn in handfuls over the surface of the batter before baking. And of course, to take it up just a bit, I made a coconut rum caramel for drizzling over the whole thing.

pina colada cobbler

makes one 9x13” or 10” round cobbler, serves 8-10