Food, Spice & Everything Nice

on (just) desserts

I don’t like to bake. Not necessarily in that “oh I cook and like to experiment and just throw delicious things together with my wild foodie imagination….and the restrictions of baking, mainly the whole having to stick to specific measurement just isn’t for me so baking cramps my style” kind of way. No, more along the lines of if I bake I have yummy deliciousness waiting for me in my kitchen and will eat nothing but these lovely lemon bars I baked for 3 days straight. For me it’s the conundrum of wanting to bake cookies or brownies and being stuck with dozens of them and eating them for brekkie/lunch/dinner, no matter how many my roomies nibble at or how many I can bring into the office for everyone else to polish off. (Confession. Even when I bring in my own baked goods to the office so that everyone on the floor can help me not eat everything I have baked I still find myself sampling my own goods—the very ones I am trying to escape and pawn off on the unsuspecting!)

And its not because I am a crappy baker either. I can make delicious and magical things. I am now reminded of the sugar cookies I baked in the shape of North Carolina thanks to my cool NC shaped cookie cutter. And they are not just magically delicious, they are legit magical. Doubt my powers? I baked these sugar cookies and covered them in dark blue colored sugar in honor of my beloved Duke Blue Devils and they won the 2010 NCAA championship. Now I brought them into the office and they got polished off by the afternoon but I still had about 10 spare cookies waiting for me at home because they did not retain the proper shape of North Cackalackie (aka North Carolina) despite my nifty cookie cutter I scored in the Outer Banks. I was kind of embarrassed to bring these misshapen cookies into the office. Some looked like other states such as Kentucky or West Virginia, far too much like other basketball power houses, while others looked oddly like chicken drumsticks. Which brings up two important points.

(1) I want to collect cookie cutters in the shape of each of the 50 states because my NC one is so damn awesome.

(2) Because of my dilemmas with baking I often do not own the proper accoutrements…like a freakin’ rolling pin.

That’s right I don’t own a rolling pin because I don’t bake cookies, except when I do and I am forced to use random things to roll out my cookie dough. Cans of beans, a quart sized round Ziploc container I keep frozen fruit for smoothies in, you get the idea. It isn’t pretty and left me with too thick dough and hence some misshapen cookies in April.

So for these reason I generally do not bake. And yet I really enjoy it and most important of all I have a serious sweet tooth. So what’s a woman to do??

 I opt for fruit crumbles and they are fabulous. Now while they are not perfect (its not like I can take them to work and just leave in the office for people to grab) they are as close to perfection as I can get. You grab some fruit—apples, blueberries, raspberries, any-kind-of-berries, peaches, nectarines, pears—whatever floats your boat and is juicy enough to make a good filling (much like pie) toss it with a bit of sugar and flour and top it with some yummy crunchy topping, stick it in the oven and voila you just baked dessert. They are dead simple, hard to screw up and easy enough to make much healthier than most baked goods. I use what I gage to be the minimum about of sugar and flour in order to let the fruit shine like the star it is. I try to make them nutritious so the main ingredients of the topping are oatmeal and chopped nuts. I have made crumbles of all the aforementioned fruits and frozen fruit works well too. Except for the apple or pear variety, I mean I have never seen and hope to never see frozen apples. In fact my apple crumble is one of two desserts we always have at Thanksgiving in my family.

This brings me to my most recent experimentation in crumbling (I like to make up new verbs). I had a surplus of plums because now that stone fruit are in season I bought a deceptively large amount of them for Trader Joe’s and stuck them in the fridge when I wasn’t finishing them fast enough to let them sit on my counter anymore. And then the horror! The skins of my plums started to wrinkle because I still wasn’t going through them fast enough. I could not let them go to waste, no way! But what the hell could I do with them? Then I vaguely remembered I watched Barefoot Contessa make some sort of plum and something else dessert that was maybe like a crumble? Anyway I didn’t look for her recipe because I resolved to just use the remaining 12 plums up in one of my crumbles. So I sliced them lovingly and let the sweet red juice coat my fingertips as I lined them into he baking dish I was using. I tossed with about 2 tablespoons of sugar and 2 of flour and then I really looked at that baking dish and it just did not seem like enough fruit! But then I remembered I had about a cup’s worth of frozen cherries in my freezer because I quickly discovered they do not make for good smoothies. So I threw the cherries to mingle with the plums. I mixed together the unmeasured amounts of oats, chopped almonds, flour, sugar, butter and generous dashes of salt and cinnamon with my hands in a separate bowl until all the ingredients were completely mixed with the butter. Topped of that adorable pile of fruit and sent it on its way to the oven to get golden on top and juicy on the bottom. When it came out I couldn’t resist having some (I have more control with fruit crumbles than other desserts) right away.

And it was divine. The plums and the cherries complemented each other amazingly. The first bite was intoxicating and tasted like a delicate red wine. You know when you pick up those not so pricey but good enough to drink bottles of wine and you read the back and they proclaim to have notes of plums or cherries—-that what this crumble was like. My mouth was filled with not just notes of plum and cherry, but a veritable symphony of beautifully colored fruit. It tasted wonderful and a bit like early fall but it is still delicate enough to eat in summer, or year round to be quite honest.

So I don’t have a recipe because I make crumbles year in and year out. I don’t have pictures because someone pocketed my camera in late March and I have yet to replace it. What I do have is a recipe-like description of how I make the crumble that started it all: apple.

So go forth and crumble!

Something approximating a recipe for my apple crumble:

Fruity goodness

granny smith apples, cored, peeled and sliced. Probably like 10.

1/2 cup of sugar or more depending on the amount of apples

a little less than 1/2 cup of all purpose flour

dash of cinnamon

a dash nutmeg

a squeeze of lemon juice if you please. Or if you don’t, forget it.

crumble top

unsalted butter

oatmeal (~1 cup)

all purpose flour

sugar

~1/4 tsp salt

cinnamon

nutmeg

chopped nuts (walnuts, almonds, whatever)

bake in a 425 oven for about 30-40 minutes and enjoy!