Dedicated Dessert

This is dedicated to a chappie who left me a lovely comment on my Prosciutto-Awesome recipe – he said he enjoyed my writing, which is a bigger compliment than saying the recipe was good or the food tasted great. This blog is about food because if it wasn’t, it would turn into random ramblings that make little to no sense to anyone but me, which is the never the point of a blog. The point of a blog is to draw as much attention to oneself as possible.

Anyway, to cut a long..thing…short, a very, very, very, very, very sincere thank you.

On with the show.

Pear + Plum Crumble.

(or, Fruit of choice + fruit of choice crumble, as no one ever has all these things “just lying about the place”. I’m using pears and plums because they are easy words to spell and are in season here in Australia most of the year.)

Ingredients:

Be practical when making this recipe. Think logically. Certain fruits do not stew well. Certain fruits do. Banana, for example, is an atrocious stewing fruit. You cannot put sliced banana in a pan with some sugar and a cinnamon quill and hope for the best. Not only will you end up with a gloopy-looking gloop of melted banana with a piece of bark sticking out of the middle, but your kitchen will never, ever smell of anything other than banana again. Apple, on the other hand, stews beautifully. Throw it in a pan and let it smudge around and you can create some smashing desserts. So, I say again, think logically. Use fruits that are juicy but not squishy. Sweet but not custardy.

…Oh for Pete(Peat’s? I’ve always loved that phrase. Makes me think some chap walks about in the world saying “FOR MY SAKE DO BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!”)’s sake, here are the fruits that will work with this dessert.

Pear

Plum

Apple

Nectarine

Apricot (but if you use it, I will skin you alive. Yeuch.)

Peach

Orange/general citrus fruits (iffy, though. Never tried it.)

ANYWAY. I AM USING PEARS AND PLUMS.

INGREDIENTS. (remember the bit further up about how I tend to ramble?)

3-4 ripe pears. Whichever pears you like. However, FINDING ripe pears is hard. You can only ever find them in one of these two forms: 1 – So hard you can use them as ammunition against hated neighbours and cause serious damage. 2 – So soft you try to pick them up and they decide to immitate Cheezles and will smoosh down over each finger until you look like a demented frog. So, buy the ammunition-esque pears and leave them in a warm, sunny place for a day or so – they should ripen up nicely.

4-5 plump plums of your choice (…what a saucy sentence.) I don’t care if you use Blood Amber, Ruby Toothpaste, whatever. Just get a bunch of plums.

Roughly 1/3 cup of caster sugar (no, you don’t want your teeth anymore…). Use less if you’re that worried.

1 cinnamon quill

Ground cinnamon

1 box digestive biscuits/graham crackers (I’ve just figured out that graham crackers are the US equivalent of what Australia calls digestives – MY WORLD MAKES SENSE AGAIN!) – roughly 250g.

Full stick of butter – I’m talking a 250g glop of solidified fat. Yeah. This recipe is great to lose weight by.

Method

1. Get yourself a ramekin dish. Go on, right now. Go to your local supermarket/homewares store and buy one. I’m not talking of those sad little 5cm wide ones, I mean a soufflé-size one – mine, for example, is about 20cms across.

2. Once purchased, wash the damned thing. You never know what grubby child has smeared his filthly little fingers all over it in the shop. (Picture a Victoria Beckham-style mother: “WILLIAM SMYTHINGTON WALLIS THE THIRD, PUT THAT DISH BACK WHERE YOU FOUND IT! NOW! MUMMY WILL NOT BUY YOU THOSE GORGEOUS LITTLE GUCCIBABY CAPRI PANTS IF YOU DON’T!” )

3. Turn your oven on low (probably about 100 degrees. I’d put it into farenheit but….well, I don’t know what the hell 100 degrees IS in farenheit) to let it heat up. I put this step here rather than first because if I don’t, someone will turn the oven on and THEN go out and buy a ramekin dish. I am not going to be responsible for destroyed houses.

4. Chop your selected fruit into around 1cm cubes. Don’t be anal about this. Seriously. Just put the knife down. I SAID PUT THE KNIFE DOWN! Good. Now, take a deep breath and back away slooooowlyyyyyyyy. That said, the smaller the pieces, the quicker they stew.

5. Heat a small pot on the stove and throw the fruit straight in, the sugar on top and then shove the quill in the middle. Turn your stove-dial-heat-thing on medium until you hear a VERY slight hissing sound coming from the contents of said pot. This is a good thing – it means the juices in the fruits are releasing and hitting the bottom of the pan. Stir a little.

6. Let the fruit mix heat up. In the meantime, put your biscuits in a gladbag/plastic bag and get a wooden mallet/dead fish.

7. BEAT THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF THE BAG.

8. Once your biscuits have been reduced to crumbs, throw them into a metal bowl (if you have one. Easier to clean.)

9. Stir the fruit. If it’s hissing loudly, turn the heat down a tad. We don’t want it cooking, we want it reducing. Stir it all around a little so the fruit is all coated in the sugar and the cinnamon quill gets rubbed against it all.

10. Cut your butter into cubes and microwave ONLY until it is melted. Please do not experiment with destroying your microwave. If you want to destroy a microwave, get a ball of aluminium (or ah-loom-inum, as you weird Americans say) foil, throw it in and put it on high for a minute. Leave the room. When you return, you will not have a microwave anymore. Or a kitchen.

11. Pour a quarter of the butter into the biscuit crumbs and GET YER HANDS DIRTY. Mix it all around. You’re aiming for a greasy bowl of biscuit crumbs that are bunching together in little groups – what you’d expect from a cheesecake base. Add the butter in small amounts and mix in until you feel your biscuit crumble is actually a biscuit crumble and not a half-dry-half-buttery bowl of sand.

12. Stir your fruit again. By this stage you should have a syrupy, goopy mix. The fruit will still be a little solid but there will be a thick glaze of juices over everything. If this is not happening, turn the heat up a little and move it all around until it becomes this way.

13. Shake some of the ground cinnamon onto the butter-biscuit mix. This is an optional step, because those of you who are not mad about cinnamon are crazy, crazy heathens and can leave this part out. I usually end up with roughly 2 teaspoons, but that’s for 250g of biscuits, so adjust accordingly (less for less, etc)

14. Stir your fruit again. Enjoying your stirring? Thought you would be.

15. If you have the patience to wait long enough for the fruit to reduce properly, you’ll be there for hours. So, if you’re S-M-A-T-R like me, you’ll turn the heat up a little more, stir a little more and wait only until you have a definite glaze going on whilst still having soft, squooshy pieces of fruit in it. Take the cinnamon quill out.

16. Take a tablespoon or so of the liquid only out of the pan and mix it into the biscuit mix. This is also optional. In fact, I don’t know if it would work, because I made it up as I was typing, because we all know that I have too many steps in my recipes as I tend to get carried away with my own sense of humour.

17. Pour the fruit mix into the ramekin dish and shake a little more cinnamon over it as though lightly dusting a cake. You can also use cinnamon sugar, if you like. In fact, do that. Use cinnamon sugar.

18. Push the biscuit mix over the top of the fruit. It should reach the top of the ramekin dish. Make sure you leave at least one tablespoon in the bowl.

19. Put the ramekin dish into the oven for approximately 10-15 minutes until the (and this is the part I love) already golden-brown biscuit mix goes…a darker golden-brown.

20. Eat the tablespoon of biscuit mix you left over.

21. Aren’t you glad you did that?

22. Once the crumble has finished oven-ing, allow to cool only for a little while, because this is best served warm. Give it about 10 minutes.

23. Scoop a dessert spoon-full onto a place and top with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or just plain double (or triple, if you can find it)/heavy cream.

24. Hand this to whoever you are making this dessert for/sharing it with.

25. Eat the rest. All of it. Every bite.

~ by araneux on January 15, 2008.