Raspberry, Oat and Almond Bake

The Guardian newspaper is producing a new supplement in Saturday's edition, entitled Cook, which features more recipes, articles and cooking tips than is usually found in the Weekend magazine.

It looks as if Dan Lepard has swapped to teaching basic baking skills for a while, which is a pity for those of us who appreciate his more innovative recipes, but there's lots more to admire in the supplement, including a selection of readers' recipes on a given theme each week.

Last week, this dessert recipe, from the 'Good for You' section, featuring recipes from Rosie Sykes, caught my eye - it features frozen raspberries and marzipan baked with a crumble-like mixture of oats, sugar and flour. The result was layers of fruit and crumble with a really strong almond flavour, but without the excess juices you often get in a soft fruit crumble.

My only quibble with the recipe is that it was impossible to mix 70g of grated butter and 150g grated marzipan into 100g flour to make a breadcrumb-like mixture. I had to add the rest of the crumble ingredients to the mix and rub the butter and marzipan into that. I was slightly short of the required weight of raspberries, so added half  a grated apple to each layer of fruit.

The dessert was only lightly sweetened, although the quality of the marzipan will affect the overall sweetness - the marzipan I used was 60% almonds. The dessert was delicious with creme fraiche, as suggested, and I thought it better eaten slightly warm, rather than straight from the oven.

It felt quite decadent to be eating raspberries in January, but frozen ones are quite good value and make a change from the usual stodgy winter desserts (or in our case, a change from the self-imposed diet of yogurt for dessert!).