Summer fruit always leaves us with the same dilemma – we long for pies, cobblers and crumbles, but we hate to turn on the oven when we're already struggling to keep cool. Enter the stovetop fruit dumpling, one of our new favorite summer desserts.

We've already made this recipe twice in the past week, and we plan to make it several more times before the summer is over. It couldn't be simpler – mix fruit and sugar, simmer, drop in some easy dumpling batter, simmer some more, done.

It would be great with just about any kind of fruit, but for this batch, we used half strawberries and half rhubarb (using it up while we still can).

The only small change we made this time around was to let the dumplings sit right on top of the fruit instead of stirring them into the juices. We liked the texture a little better this way, but we're really nitpicking here – there's no way to make this not delicious.

Since we are trying to stay cool, we like to top ours with a little ice cream, but some heavy cream would be great too – again, there are no wrong answers here. Just an incredibly easy summer treat.

• Strawberry Dumpling from Gourmet

Related: Why Not? Eating Fruit Desserts for Breakfast

(Images: Joanna Miller)