Man Cannot Live On Cake Alone.....

..... especially at the weekend! It's time for a dessert.

I had two pieces of luck yesterday. I was given a large bag of windfall cooking apples by a complete stranger (he was intending to deliver them to my neighbours who are away, and decided he didn't want to carry them home), and I passed a couple of kids sitting outside their house, trying to sell greengages to passers-by. That was too good to resist! I bought a kilogram and put 350g into the freezer, 350g aside for a dessert, and ate the other 300g during stoning.

It's very hot and humid today, too hot for anything requiring elaborate preparations or much time in the kitchen, so I decided to make a fruit crumble.

Greenage and Apple Crumble

I added some of the windfall apples to the halved and de-stoned greengages - about 150g after preparation - to bring the total weight of fruit up to around 500g. I added two teaspoons of cornflour and 3 tablespoons of sugar. Greengages are very sweet, so only a little extra sugar was needed, primarly to sweeten the apples. The cornflour was to thicken any fruit juices produced.

I think almonds are a complimentary flavour to plums, so decided to include some in the crumble mix. I'm old fashioned about crumbles and like to have a thick layer of topping on the fruit; the current fashion for a few tablespoons of topping sprinkled over baked fruit doesn't say 'crumble' to me! To make enough topping for 4 portions I used:

50g SR flour
50g rolled oats
50g ground almonds
75g caster sugar
75g butter, cut into small cubes

Put everything into a mixing bowl and rub the butter into the dry ingredients. It's best to leave this mixture lumpy, so don't rub in the butter as much as for pastry!

Put the fruit mix into a 1 litre ovenproof dish - I use a Pyrex casserole dish - tip the crumble mix on top, spread evenly and press down lightly. Bake at 190C, Gas 5 for about 40 minutes, until the crumble is golden and the fruit bubbling. This is a fairly tolerant recipe, so you can bake it higher and faster or more slowly at a lower temperature, if you are coooking other things at a different temperature.

Tonight we ate this just above room temperature, with some Greek yogurt.