Tuesday 16 February 2010

Plum and Pecan Crumble

This plum and pecan crumble (which can just as easily be made with walnuts) is comfortingly autumnal - Nigella Lawson

plums -before
The verdict: We had an abundance of plums from our backyard tree this year and after I'd made chilli plum sauce (also a Nigella recipe) I had to do something with the rest if i was to avoid having a bucket of rotten fruit to dispose of. This was a first step towards using them up.

Unusual or substituted ingredients: None. I did everthing as written, down to the Demerera sugar which I think is barely distinguishable from raw sugar, but you know, I like to things properly.


Special utensils or cookware: I have a great big pie dish I rarely use. It got a work out for this recipe although you could just as easily use anything that's wide and flat.

plums - after

I was pretty happy when I pulled the plums out of the oven after their first bout of buttery, brown sugary roasting before adding the crumble!

Repeatability: Oh I'll do this again. And again. A plum crumble like this one uses 1kg of plums. That's 1kg less to deal with!

Sauciness: Rich, juicy and oh so flavoursome. Yep.

crumble

Overall pleasure level:
It was gorgeous. The finely chopped pecans in the crumble really add a lot of texture and flavour. Next time I'll work on improving my crumble making skills. I loathe the job of rubbing cubes of butter into flour. I got lazy and stopped way before the point where it reached a state of being 'like fine breadcrumbs' and as a result, I think it didn't cook quite well enough. It still had a bit of that raw flour taste. And I'd probably add a smidge more demerera sugar to the mix as well. Otherwise, lovely!