Apple and Blackberry Crumble

Being a country girl, pretty much every hedgerow and tree around where I live is covered in blackberries or apples at the moment, and it’s times like these – when fruit is literally falling onto your doorstep – that you need to make the most of it. The other day a big bag of cooking apples magically appeared on the kitchen table, which happens a lot now that my Mum has discovered foraging. But lucky for me I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them –  when life gives you apples, make apple crumbles.

Ever since I was small a big bowl of this with some custard would put a smile on my face, and it still does to this day. You can put almost any fruit into a crumble – rhubarb, berries or pears just to name a few other classics. Blackberries and apples are definitely my go-to couple though, as they carry a lot of flavour, and they’re the perfect combo of sweet and sharp.

I’d recommend serving this with a really good custard. You can either make this powdered, in which case follow the back of the packet’s instructions, or you could make an even better custard from scratch. For this I have a really good recipe which is on two of my other posts – Bakewell roly poly and French fruit tarts – the links to which are at the bottom of this post under ‘you may also like’ (if they’re not there, refresh the page and they’ll pop up or go to my recipe index).

Recipe

Serves 8

Time: 1 hour

Ingredients

• 4 Bramley apples
• 85g Brown sugar
• 150g Blackberries
• 150g Butter
• 150g Caster sugar
• 150g Plain flour
• 150g Rolled oats
• 1 tsp Ground cinnamon

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180˚C.
2. Peel, core and chop the apples into chunks.
3. Put the apples into a pan with the brown sugar and heat gently until they begin to break down and soften. At this point remove them from the heat, add the blackberries, and set aside for now.
4. Now make the crumble topping. Put the butter and caster sugar into a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until smooth and light. Add the flour and rub it into the butter mixture with your fingers. Work this until you get a bread-crumb texture, shaking the bowl from side to side every so often to bring the lumps to the top.
5. Add the oats and cinnamon, and then mix with a round bladed knife to combine with the breadcrumb mixture. Don’t worry if clumps form, this will happen as the butter will have softened, it’ll taste good.
6. Take a large oven-proof pot or dish and put the stewed apples and blackberries into it. Spoon the crumble over the top loosely, not pressing down as you want it to remain crumbly.
7. Put the crumble into the oven for 25-35 minutes until the topping is golden brown and slightly crisp.
8. Serve immediately with lots of custard, cream or ice cream.

Thanks so much for reading and happy national baking week! We’re getting halloweeeny on the next few posts so make sure you look out for them.

Emma x