recipe : apple and cinammon crumble

If there's one thing that really de-stresses me it's baking and cooking desserts. Main menus and actual good for you food doesn't work for me as it's not entirely in my comfort zone. But making cakes, cookies, crumbles, ice cream etc is where I get into the the zone and chill out, it's sort of my escape. Plus you get a scrummy treat at the end of it so what isn't to love! :)

Lets get started with one of my favourite dessert dishes, apple crumble. This was my favourite even before I started adding other bits and bobs into the mix and now I seem to love it even more. My apple crumble does not last long in our house!


First you will need to make sure that you have all of the ingredients and aparatus below. I get mine all out and ready which makes the whole process quicker and much easier.

you will need
a large saucepan
a mixing bowl
oven proof dish fit for a finished crumble

filling
4 cooking apples
2 small handfuls of sultanas
a heaped tablespoon of ground cinammon

topping
10oz plain flour
6oz cooking butter, at room temperature
6oz caster sugar
a small teaspoon of cinammon to taste, if you like



Chop your apples into bite sized wedges. I tend to remove the apple core and cut 1 cooking apple into 8 by halving, then again and so on until happy with the size. Repeat this for all 4 apples.

Then put these into a large saucepan on a medium heat with about 3 tablespoons of water. Not too much water otherwise you'll have a very soggy filling! Pop the lid slightly of centre and keep an eye on it. I find 4 apples can take around 15 to 20 minutes to be at the right gooey /hard mixed consistency we need then.

Whilst your apples are cooking it's time to make the topping. This is my favourite part! Other online recipes will tell you do do it differently but through experience I find my way to be the most rewarding.

Chuck all of your topping ingredients into one bowl and start rubbing away with your hands. You need to make sure that the butter is spread out throughout the bowl of powder ingredients and covered by them. Rubbing the mixture between your thumb and two fingers to get this bread crumb appearance. It might take a while, but get stuck in with 2 hands always mixing and rubbing from the bottom of the bowl throughout until you have a topping you're happy with, like this. Don't overdo this part as you could end up with a lumpy gooey mess which will not look cook once cooked!

Now that your topping is ready, you may have to wait on the apples. Once these are done to an almost gooey consistency but where you can still see some wedge shapes, take the pan off of the heat and pour straight into your oven proof serving dish.

Scatter the sultanas over the apple mixture and then the cinammon on top of that. you can use as little or as much of these as you like, the crumble should be completely to your taste.

Now add the topping as evenly as possible and put the finished crumble in the middle of a preheated oven for 20 minutes or until golden.

Unfortunately I don't have a final photo as when this particular crumble came out of the oven, I wasn't quick enough to grab the camera before there was a rather large piece missing courtesy of my boyfriend! Sorry guys .. But that shows you how good it really is, right?

♥ abby xx