Crumble cake

Well, its been a while folks. I've been working on a commission to illustrate a kids story/ poem which has been taking up a lot of my time but has been really enjoyable. Whilst my website learning/ design stuff has taken a bit of a back seat I have still managed to make some goodies recently. I made this crumble cake for mothers day and then made a traybake version for a charity bakesale. I made two for mothers day one using rhubarb and strawberry, the other apple and strawberry. The first tin I used was a deep sided 18cm the second a sandwich tin 20cm which seemed to work slightly better and came out the loose bottomed tin a lot easier. Either way they have all tasted delicious and firm up once cooked and are lovely served with tea or as a dessert. The apple and strawberry combo worked really well and the recipe I used was adapted from lots of crumble cake recipes but using my old faithful crumble topping recipe (the topping recipes I'd looked at seemed to have unusual ratios of sugar, flour to butter.

85g Flour

2 eggs
85g Caster Sugar

Mixture of fruits strawberries, apples, rhubarb, blackberries work well (about 400g)

Topping – makes enough for a cake and a crumble can half

4oz (115g) flour

2 oz butter (50g)
2 oz sugar (50g) we used light muscovado

Preheat oven to 160° oven (fan). Cream the butter and the sugar . Add the eggs then fold in the flour and a pinch of salt – add some milk if needs be to make a dropping consistency. Put into a 20cm sandwich or cake tin ( loose bottomed helps).

Cut the apples into wedges , slice strawberries (with the rhubarb we stewed it slightly in the first cake for about 10 minutes then drained some of the juices, but on reflection it might have been better to use dry rhubarb cut into bite size pieces as the first cake seemed to look a bit wetter at the bottom.)

Mix the fruit with a bit of sugar about 1tbsp of caster or light muscovado sugar. Lay over sponge mix. Bake at 160° oven for about 25 minutes.
Make crumble topping then place on top of cake and finish with a last sprinkling of sugar. Return to the oven for a further 20 – 25 minutes.  Leave in tin to cool for 10 minutes. Remove from cake and allow to cool on wire rack. The cake tastes lovely slightly warm from the oven but left to cool will firm up nicely and goes lovely with some tea.