Blackberry and Apple Crumble

It is Foodie Friday, so thankyou once again the the lovely Gollum for hosting it. Last Sunday we went blackberry picking. It was the second last day of the school Summer holidays and it was glorious. We wandered the lanes near the Reservoir for about an hour and a half with beach buckets in hand.

Between the five of us we managed to collect approximately one and a half kilograms of blackberries; which isn’t too bad really considering the amount of surreptitious sampling that was going on. B3 didn’t even bother trying to sneak them she just nabbed them as often as she could and jammed them into her mouth before they could be rescued and put back into the communal bucket.

The sloes were also out so we collected about one and a half kilograms of them as well. They are currently in the freezer in a bag as this apparently mimics the effect of first frost, which is when you are supposed to pick them. I’ve never cooked with sloes before so this should make for some strange experimental flavours I think. B2 and I both sampled one and I think it took about ten minutes for our lips to recover from the resulting pucker – that is one sour fruit.

I cooked the blackberries for about ten minutes over a low heat with just the few drops of water left on them from washing and three tablespoons of sugar.

B2 and I whipped up a quick crumble to topping:

Crumble Topping

¾ cup of Self Raising Flour
½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon
80g of softened butter
½ cup of brown sugar.

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and rub the butter through the dry ingredients until the mix resembles bread crumbs. This takes about ten minutes or so, or 15 with help from B2. Then sprinkle over the top of your fruit mix and bake in a 180*C oven for 30 minutes.

We combined the blackberries with some of the apple sauce from the freezer and we doubled the amount of crumble as it was a very large batch.

The timer went ‘ding’ but I was reading a few blogs in the study so the top came out a little darker than was intended but it still tasted lovely. Note to self - the timer goes 'ding' come immediately don't just read a few more pages or on your head be it. It is very tasty with home-made custard or cream or ice-cream, or all three in fact but I am trying to be ‘good’ so we just had it plain, hot from the oven. It came out of the oven at 3.30pm and was all eaten by 7.30pm, with dinner in between. There were three very full tummies that night.