Stawberry (& blackberry & almond) crumble!

A crumble is a most magical thing. You can take the hardest, most frigid winter rhubarb and pears and make them fragrant and amazing (and if Nigella tells you to do it, you do it).

It may seem strange therefore to put gorgeous-tasting-on-their-own summer strawberries in a crumble, its a BOSS idea for the following reasons

• Delicious local summer strawberries start to go mouldy quickly and when they’re past the stage where you’d want to eat them raw, this crumble is the answer
• It just tastes divine – its the taste of SUMMER

I’ve made some changes to Nigella’s original recipe to omit the flour because I had a non-gluten eating friend over for dinner and wanted to be able to make something that was gluten free, healthy(ish) and delicious.

Here’s what you need

• 450g strawberries, hulled (with the green bits cut off! you don’t want to eat the green bits. Lee does)
• 50g blackberries (or rasberries, or pretty much whatever you like)
• 15g caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 5 tablespoons cold butter
• 100g flaked almonds
• 50g light muscavado sugar
• 100g ground almonds

Firstly, put the fruit into a casserole dish or tin and sprinkle over some caster sugar and vanilla extract. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have used as much caster sugar as these were sweet summer strawberries, but if you’re making this in the winter months with imported strawberries it may be needed.

I used this ceramic white dish to bake my crumble in but you could use a brownie or loaf tin, whatever you have. Next, in a bowl, mix up your butter, flaked almonds, sugar and ground almonds. The mixture is quite a bit wetter than a normal crumbly (duh!) crumble mix but spread it around on top of your fruit (I used fingers, utensils are no good for this job!) as evenly as you can – there will be some gaps. But thats fine.

Sprinkle on a little more sugar (light muscavado or demerera for that crunchy crumble flavour) and flaked almonds and pop into a pre-heated oven at gas mark 6/180 degrees for about 30 minutes.

How you could make it even better!

• cook for a little longer to get more of that yummy crumble crunch
• add some chopped mint in with the fruit – YUM!

The crumble stuck around for about 30 minutes before being completely devoured so I’d say it was a success! Seriously – it was pretty amazing with some vanilla ice cream and I’d really recommend it as a very summery dessert – its even pretty healthy!