Ahh, crumble. Homely, satisfying and great for a January treat. I’d been thinking about making a primal crumble with custard for a while and suddenly had the inspiration to give it a go.
I was happy with my effort; sweet/tart cherries, crumbly topping and creamy custard. Any other frozen berries would be good and gathered blackberries would be sublime. I split the crumbles into two separate bowls so scale up or down as required.
Ingredients
2 x handfuls frozen, unsweetened cherries
2 x handfuls ground almonds
½ tablespoon maple syrup or honey
2 tablespoons butter
Around 10 roughly chopped macadamia nuts (pecans or walnuts would be good for a ‘nuttier’ flavour)
1 small pot of thick cream
2 egg yolks
Vanilla extract or vanilla pod
1. Put the oven on to heat at around 180C.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the almond flour and chopped nuts. Put the butter and maple syrup into the bowl and twiddle the mixture between your fingers to create a crumble. It’s not quite the same consistency as when using flour and my mixture had quite a few bigger blobs of buttery almond flour, so I cut the amount down a little for this recipe. This didn’t really affect the final crumble ‘mouth-feel’.
3. Put a handful of the cherries into an oven proof bowl and cover with a layer or the crumble mixture. Place in the centre of the oven for about 20 minutes until the crumble has browned a little and the cherries have defrosted, cooked and gone a little syrupy.
4. Meanwhile, put the cream into a small pan with the scraped vanilla seeds or extract and heat gently. Whisk in the egg yolks and keep whisking until the custard is thicker in texture. Be careful here as it’s easy to heat too fast and scramble your eggs. If this happens, add a little water to cool the mixture down a bit and whisk harder. Turn the heat off when the custard goes as custardy as you like it.
5. Pour the custard on top and tuck in!
The Primal Cyclist 