péché mignon | apple crumble

Serves 4

This is a delicious dessert. The topping is extra light and crumbly and I think you'd be hard pushed to find someone who really didn't like this as a pudding or who could tell it was wheat and dairy-free. You can make all sorts of different fruit fillings using plums, rhubard, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries or whatever was in season.

Wheat free, dairy free, nut free, meat free version...

Method...

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C.
2. In a saucepan, over a gentle-moderate heat, cook the apple in the water until soft and stewed. Keep stirring to prevent apples from sticking and burning on botom of pan. It cooks more quickly if, in between stirring, you keep the lid on too.
3. Meanwhile, in a mixing bowl, rub the margarine and flour with your fingertips until it completely blends together and you get a fine crumble. (According to my Grandma, you only need to use the tips of your fingers, and indeed she does. But I don't know, after years of making crumbles, I still manage to get the mixture all over my fingers, hands and myself!)
4. Add the ground almonds, 2 tbsp of the sugar and stir the mixture well.
5. When the apples have stewed, add the leftover tbsp of the sugar and the cinnamon and stir in until sugar dissolves.
6. Put the apple mixture in an ovenproof dish and cover with the crumble.
7. Bake for approximately half an hour or until the crumble is golden brown.

Maybe serve with...

This is lovely on its own, but you can always serve it with a vanilla non-dairy custard, a dollop of silken tofu, oat cream or soya icecream.

For those able to eat wheat...

You can make the crumble mixture with wheat flour. But to be perfectly honest, I would use the wheat free flour regardless. It makes a much lighter and finer topping. Usually people find it difficult to work with wheat free flour because it's so crumbly, which makes cake baking and pastry more awkward. But for this, the crumbliness is actually a real bonus!

If you have apples leftover, see the apple and sherry towers, granité and baked apples. If you have flour leftover, see Maggie B's lethal chocolate cake.

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