Blackberry & Apple Crumble: a quick photo post

Blackberry & Apple Crumble

For the crumble:
70g plain flour
60g cold unsalted butter
40g light brown sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch of fine sea salt

For the filling:
1 big cooking apple
3 or 4 small eating apples (preferably plucked straight from the tree)
a good squeeze of lemon juice - approx 1 tbsp
50g light brown sugar
a big handful of blackberries (preferably wild, plucked from the hedgerows with stained hands as you amble along on a Sunday walk)

Preheat the oven to 180C/350C. Tip the flour into a mixing bowl then cut the butter into small cubes. Add the cubes to the flour and rub in until most of the butter is worked in but you still have a few small lumps. Stir in the sugar, cinnamon and salt.

Fill a mixing bowl (I had to change the one in the photo above as it was too small) with water and add a good squeeze of lemon. Peel, core and chop the apples, placing the chopped bits into the lemon water so they don't brown while you do the rest (both types together weighed roughly 475g for me). Drain the apples the stir the brown sugar through. Tip half of the apples into a medium sized baking dish then scatter half of the blackberries on top. Add the remaining apple, then the remaining blackberries. Spread the crumble over the top in an even layer. Place in the oven and bake for around 30 minutes or until bubbling, the apple yields easily to a knife when poked and the topping is golden brown.

Serve slightly cooled but still hot with custard, ice cream or cream.

(Serves 4-5)



Three other apple posts:
2010: Spiced Apple Cake
2011: Apple & Quince Pie
2012: Apple Fritters

Pear Pie & Raspberry Caramels

You know how sometimes everything you cook is just a little bit off? Not ruined, not inedible - just not what you'd expected. This week has been like that. Every day I wake up and think that today will be the day when I get my act together.

Maybe tomorrow.

After many experiments and accidents, I don't have a recipe for you this week. Instead, I have two ideas represented by two sets of photos. It seemed a shame to waste them. After writing about the hidden scaffolding of rules and habits behind this blog last week, it seems almost appropriate to break them.

First, I made a pear pie that had a bit of a soggy bottom (I dread to think what Mary Berry would have said).

My mum came to visit last weekend as there was a tiny slit of light in my schedule. The main reason the pastry went wrong was that I had to take the pie out of the oven early or she would have missed her flight home to Switzerland as she refused to leave without tasting it. I've also never made a pie with a pastry base in this ceramic dish - I think a metal one would be better.

You actually don't really need a recipe for this - just use your favourite pastry recipe (I used the one from the Apple and Quince Pie) and fill with chunks of firm but ripe pear. I mixed a tablespoon of brown sugar with half a teaspoon of ground ginger and sprinkled it between each layer of pears. The pears were concordes and were some of the best I've ever tasted.

I also tried to make some freeze-dried raspberry fudge, inspired by some I ate on my trip to Edinburgh a few weeks ago. It was my first attempt at fudge. I appear to have made caramels. Absolutely gorgeous, vanilla-flecked, raspberry-studded, salted caramels.

But as they're not what the recipe was meant to make and I can't test it again today to check, I don't feel comfortable giving you the recipe. I think the pastry gods were trying to tell me something - caramels appear to be an even better place for the raspberries than fudge.

If you can't wait for me to do more testing, you could try finishing a tin of salted butter caramels from David Lebovitz with a handful of crushed freeze-dried raspberries (I stirred some in, too, hence the slightly weird bumps). It's quite different from the recipe I used but I think it would give you a similar taste and texture.

A few related posts:
Banoffee Pies
Ginger Bourbon Pecan Pie
Dusky Caramel and Raspberry Crêpe Cake