Dear friends, we here at Team Wingfeather are so glad to have you all on board, and have almost (almost) recovered from the insane, thrilling, wonderful, heartwarbling, astonishing five weeks that was the animated series investment phase. You may have noticed that our socials have been a bit silent while we’ve caught our breath. But I’m happy to tell you, something fun is on the horizon. :-) No spoilers! But we’ve been having some excellent behind-the-scenes meetings, and I can tell you, you want to be watching the socials. ;-) So be sure you’re following us on Facebook or Instagram!
Meanwhile, speaking of fun interactive things on the socials, a lot of folks have been asking about the blueberry gooeyball recipe we tried out at the Virtual Dragon Day Festival! You can still find one version of the recipe on Facebook and Instagram, but one of our local bakers (herself no stranger to festivals) dove right in, flour flying, and presented us with another variant as well. So we need to officially chronicle both of those here, for you and for posterity.
Oskar’s discovery
Featherheads, flabbits, and fendril-riders! After long years of searching, Oskar N. Reteep tells me that he might have finally found the fabled secret recipe… for blueberry gooeyballs!
Ah! Those gooeyballs! I have wished with my whole heart to taste them, but the Dark Sea is so deep and so wide and so dark, and I have never made it to the Dragon Day Festival. Until now, of course, with you! And this recipe looks very promising.
For starters, it was found in Glipwood, in a slightly-burned cottage, with smudges of blueberry sauce and only one tear! Of course, this means that we have had to do a little reconstructing.
Oskar has squinted at it, and I have squinted at it both upside-down and sideways, and our friend Mallif from Bylome, known for her attention to details, has squinted at it, and we think we are ready to give it a try. Would you like to try with us?
If you make this recipe (or if you have a secret recipe of your own!), please share it with us! Just give us a tag on social media. I’m so eager to find out if this is the real secret recipe!
Onward! To gooeyballs and victory!
—Madame Sidler
The first* Variant:
I don’t really *do* tight and concise recipe edits...but here ya go!
Madame Sidler was, of course, accurate and helpful in her translation of this recipe. However, I found that my particular climate demanded some adaptations for optimal gooeyness. For me, that meant less flour, more butter, and additional goo.
The flour problem is that you can’t add flour to a bread dough using a recipe, per se. You have to figure out how much flour feels right to you. Wildly irritating, but true. This dough should be tacky, but not sticky. You should be able to pick it up without it completely sticking to your hands, but it shouldn’t be dry. Firmer than a goo, but looser than a ball. More like a blob. Blob-producing flour ratios will change depending on where you live, if it’s raining, and whether or not the dough senses fear. So be brave! But also cautious. Add the flour slowly, and stop adding early if you feel like you should (I did).
Also, butter. There should be more. Apply this concept broadly across all areas of your culinary life, but here specifically, 3 Tbsp should do nicely.
For the filling goo:
1ish pint blueberries
2ish Tbsp sugar
Pinch of salt
The juice of half a lemon (is that a teaspoon? Maybe 2?)
2ish tablespoon water
Put in small pot. Boil, but gently, while stirring a lot, until thick. Use a wooden spoon if you want to tie dye that spoon. Otherwise, don’t. Congratulations! You made jam! (Alternatively, you could buy blueberry jam. I hear the Green Hollows has several jars if you don’t.)
After you fry and cool the donuts as instructed, it’s time to put the (cooled) jam into the gooey balls. I took the back of a spoon, stabbed it into the side of the donut hole, wiggled it around to make space for jam, and then filled that space with jam. If you do what I did, you’ll deposit the jam with the same back of spoon that you originally used to stab the donut. This all felt unnecessarily violent and went generally poorly, but I have no better suggestions.
This would probably be great with the blueberry glaze, too, but I ran out of blueberries, so I made vanilla glaze. Here is how.
Dump a lot of powdered sugar in a tallish bowl. 2 cups? Squirt it with some vanilla. Probably 1/2 tsp. A pinch of salt, too. Then drizzle half and half (or milk) very slowly, a teaspoon at a time, and stir thoroughly between additions. Stop when glaze is slightly thinner than pancake batter. Dunk filled gooey balls into glaze, fish out with a couple of forks, and place on cooling rack until set. It’s worth the wait for the creme to get...well...crispy.
Grab some napkins, go outside, and enjoy with the rest of your Dragon Day Festival festivities!
—Rachel Matar
*The first among many, we hope! Will yours be the next one?