Apple Crumble The Retarded Way

This Fri­day was Ryan’s birth­day and as such there had to be cake.

This wasn’t a prob­lem as a) cake is easy and b) cake is fun.

Here is how we did it (hold your mouse over the pic­tures below for MAGIC).

Firstly we took this recipe by Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall and then more or less ignored it.

Now accord­ing to Hugh you will need 180g of plain flour. Which is more or less what’s in this bowl only we replaced some of the flour with oats because we had some. Also because we could.

Next you need 120g chilled but­ter which you’ll want to cut into cubes. This is a lot of but­ter. When we got to this part of the recipe I was like “120g of but­ter? Really? I am look­ing at it and that seems like an excess of but­ter…”. But that’s what you need. Ser­i­ously.

Now you’re going to need to wash your hands (this is import­ant because oth­er­wise you will make an unhy­genic cake which is not fun). Once you’ve done that dry them off, pick up some of your but­ter and add it to your flour. Then get rub­bing it together. Con­tinue to do this until all your but­ter is in the flour and the whole thing looks like bread crumbs. It will take a while but it will make you buff. Super buff.

Now you need 80g of sugar. Hugh says caster sugar but we didn’t have any. Either that or I couldn’t see any because our kit­chen cup­boards are too high up for me to use prop­erly. Any­way Dem­er­ara sugar is nicer so that’s what we used. Throw the sugar of your choice into your bowl of flour and but­ter and mix well to com­plete your crumble mix. Cover it and stow it in the fridge while you deal with the apples. Once you’ve done this turn on your oven and pre-heat that mother­fucker to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. We chose 180C because met­ric RULES.

You’re going to need a kilo or so of apples. Like the but­ter this seems excess­ive. We chose Gala, Golden Deli­cious and some little home grown apples kindly donated by my mother. Hugh says Bramley apples. I don’t even know what Bramley apples are.

Get peel­ing

Use the peeler to core all your apples. By this point your hands will be sticky and you will hate apples. But don’t stop because next you want to cut up all the apples into chunks of whatever size you feel like and throw them into *another* bowl.

Add about a table spoon (or two or three) of lemon juice to your apples and then quickly fol­low it with two table spoons of water. This helps to cook your apples which is a good thing.

Ginger. This was not in the ori­ginal recipe — I just had some. If you also have some chop it up and throw it in with your apples.

The next step is adding another 80 grams of sugar and some fresh rasp­ber­ries and some cin­na­mon to your apple, lemon juice and ginger mix and then stick­ing your hands in there. This will actu­ally feel more sticky than when they were covered in apple but they will taste deli­cious. Make sure everything is nicely covered in sugar etc and tip into an oven­proof dish big enough to hold everything. At this point I wasn’t sure we had one of those.

Remove your crumble mix from the fridge and cover your fruit with it. Try to do it evenly because oth­er­wise your cumble will be lop­sided and this would suck. Sprinkle on some nut­meg and fur­ther sugar for good luck. After you’re done with this put it in the oven and go order some pizza from a local take away. You made crumble — you don’t also need to make din­ner.

After you’ve ordered your pizza, eaten a few slices and a good 40 minutes have passed check on your crumble. If it looks golden on top it’s done. Remove it from the oven. With oven gloves because it will be hot.

Serve into vivdly pat­terned bowls and ladle on cream. Our cream had more sugar, vanilla essence and maple syrup whisked into it because I can’t leave well enough alone. It was deli­cious though. The next step is to shovel the crumble into your mouth.

Beer.