Crumbling occasionally

Miniature crumble (slightly sunken) and custard

Despite being among the more fortunate (I am fairly healthy, far from being short of things to occupy my time or headspace, and haven't been spending lockdown alone), my state of mind has definitely been up and down over the past few weeks. As the weather has temporarily turned more autumnal, so has my mood.

This is not entirely a bad thing because autumn means crumble. (To be fair, in my kitchen every season is crumble season, but it feels like an autumnal dish.) Crumble has sneaked into fellow bloggers' posts a couple of times so far and it's time to give it a post to itself.

Said to have been either invented or popularised during the Second World War, crumble is an excellent pudding for difficult conditions. It is less exacting than pastry-based things, requiring less time and less skill, as well as less flour, fat and sugar. In my experience, it also tolerates variation in ingredients, proportions and oven temperatures very well. Most importantly, it is tasty and comforting.

In short, crumble is the perfect signature dish for a greedy person with moderate enthusiasm, limited talent and a shaky grasp of basic cookery. That person is me.

Like many things worth knowing, my crumble recipe is loosely based on one from a Ladybird book. According to this oracle, the desired proportions for the topping are two parts flour to one part marg and one part sugar. Sometimes I make it slightly stickier for a more 'clustered' look and sometimes I don't. Quite often I don't weigh the ingredients, bringing a frisson of uncertainty to the whole proceedings.

Some of the crumble-making habits I have developed over the years are:

• Sweetening the fruit with golden syrup if I have some
• Adding a bit of cornflour to the fruit it is likely to be runny
• Making the crumble topping with proper butter, wholemeal flour and some ground spices (most often cinnamon and ginger), and sometimes adding oats

Yesterday, Head Chef requested gooseberry crumble. This was to make six portions: three to be served with custard and the rest to be saved for today and served with ice-cream.

For the fruit layer, I used:
475g of defrosted and drained gooseberries (grown by my dad last year - I am fortunate indeed)
a dessertspoon of cornflour
3 dessertspoons of golden syrup (which was barely enough as the result was very slightly tart)

I didn't bother stewing the fruit first. If it's good enough for Ladybird it's good enough for me.

For the crumble topping, I initially rubbed together:
120g spelt flour (from a bag bought pre-lockdown)
65g unsalted butter
65 sugar (mostly the end of a bag of very dark stuff, topped up with some white sugar)

Before cooking

We also had a bit of frozen rhubarb, so I made two miniature crumbles in ramekins, for the one member of the household who dislikes gooseberries. The crumble topping looked like it would not quite enough to cover these too, so I stretched it by mixing in a handful of porridge oats and bit more sugar. It then just about covered the big dish with enough left over for the ramekins.

The oven was on at 180°C fan anyway. The big dish took nearly 25 minutes and the mini ones 13 or 14 minutes.

The custard was ready-made from a carton, of course. I hope you're not disappointed. We weren't.

After cooking