Welcome to #MadeItMonday, where I post something I’ve made in the previous week, and where you can join in and post something you made too! The rules are easy: post a pic somewhere of something you’ve made in the last week (ish; let’s say in the last month as the hard-and-fast) and tag it. Sit back and enjoy scrolling through all the beautiful things we’ve collectively created, and celebrate the fact that humans can be awesome! 🙂
If you follow along on twitter or instagram, you’ll have seen the haul of berries we picked at the beginning of March – about 3kg, which if we bought frozen would cost us about $24 for the supermarket brand ones or nearly double that for brand name ones, and if we bought 3kg fresh you’d be looking at near $100. For three hours of kiddie entertainment? Priceless, as the old ad used to go.
Anyway, I jammed about 2kg of the fruit because even after a single night in the fridge the berries were getting questionable (no wonder they’re so expensive fresh o.O) and we lost about 300g or so to mould. Talk about a short shelf life! (Ooh, one of the jars of jam literally just popped as I’m typing this!) The remaining 600g or so went half to a crumble the night after picking, and half to a blackberry galette.*
* At least, I’m planning a galette.** I’m pretending as though I’m writing this in the future about the past, when really I’m writing it in the past about the future. Fun times.
** You’ll know if it was a galette or not because if it was, I’ll post the recipe next week 😉 😀
The crumble turned out super tasty and was ridiculously quick and easy, so I thought I’d share the recipe :3 Fair warning, part of the reason it’s quick and easy is because YOU LITERALLY DO NOT MEASURE ANYTHING, OKAY? Okay. This is all about eyeballing, because yo, it’s a crumble, and it literally does not matter.
SUPER QUICK AND EASY BLACKBERRY CRUMBLE
Ingredients:
Blackberries, or other berries, fresh or frozen. I used about 350g, at a guess.
White sugar, to taste. I used about 2 heaped dessert spoons.
More white sugar, about 1/3c, very ‘ish’.
Brown sugar, ditto.
Butter, I don’t even know, like about 70-80g??? A CHUNK, OKAY. A CHUNK OF BUTTER. Only then dice it to make your life easier later one. But keep it cold. A cold chunk of butter cut into little cold cubes rectangular-ish irregular prisms, m’kay?
Oats. You think I measured them? AH HA. You’re so cute. (But it was maybe 1/2c.)
A squirt of vanilla bean paste. Maybe 1/2t?
Method:
- Heat yo’ oven to, like 180Cish, which is a moderate oven for all you Fahrenheiters.
- Grab yon oven-proof dish, of whatever size you like. Mine was, IDK, about a 20cm round? Except it’s moon-shaped, not round? (WHEE the other jam lid just popped!)
- Fill yon oven-proof dish with berries to about half an inch below the rim.
- Sprinkle some white sugar over the berries. I used about 2 heaped dessert spoons.
- In a separate bowl, like a breakfast bowl or whatever you have handy that’s clean, stir up your other white sugar and the brown sugar. IDK, I might have actually used castor sugar instead of white sugar at this point. WHATEVER. IT DOES NOT MATTER. White granular sweet stuff, m’kay? M’kay. Mix them sugars up good. Then…
- Rub in the butter. For those of you who haven’t rubbed butter before, you’re in for a treat. You’re aiming to turn the whole thing into a kind of sand (when you do this properly with flour, it looks like dry sand, but you’re skipping the flour because I can’t eat a lot of gluten or I can’t breathe, and yo, flour would be an extra ingredient and we are keeping this Teh Simplez), and since you’re doing this with sugar, it’ll look a lot like wet sand, and have a similar consistency. What you’re NOT aiming to do is melt the butter. So: fingertips only, and think ‘squish’. Like, literally squish the butter prisms between your fingertips with the sugar. Keep going until it’s mostly all squished in, and you have wet sand. If there are some lumps left, that’s okay; better a few lumps than melted butter. Keep it cool, yo.
- Mix through the oats and the vanilla.
- Pat the oat/butter/sugar mix over the berries in your oven-proof dish.
- Oven that sucker for about half an hour, or until the berries are all bubbly and the topping is starting to get crispy.
- If you eat it hot, it’ll be super runny, which is fine, if you like that kind of thing. If you leave it to cool, it’ll get gooey, which is also fine, if you like that kind of thing. Either way, eat it with vanilla ice-cream, because Obviously. Yum.
- Also, if you follow my quantities, it should feed about 3 adults, more or less.
(I feel like 10 steps makes this sound harder than it really is. Like, literally dump some sugar and berries in a dish, and top them with more sugar that you mixed with butter, oats and vanilla. DONE.)
What have you made this week? (It doesn’t have to be fancy!!) Don’t forget to tag your contribution, or even better, leave a link in the comments!! I love seeing what inspiring things other people have made 🙂 🙂 🙂