the cooked and the raw

This is a lovely moist cake for any time of the day. It’s definitely one of those breakfast components that gets me out of bed but I think it’s ideal to conclude a light meal, too. What I like most about this cake is the intense, unique ‘cinnamony apple’ smell that wafts through the house while the cake bakes… As usual I suggest using organic ingredients for a healthier, tastier, and more natural result… ;) 

Ingredients:

4 Golden Delicious apples, cut into chunks

1 cup wholemeal flour

1 cup ground Brazil nuts

1 tablespoon organic baking powder (I used cream of tartar)

1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon powder

¼ teaspoon whole sea salt

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

6 tablespoons rice malt syrup

½ cup rice milk

Preheat oven to 180° C, lightly oil a 20 cm round cake pan and sprinkle with flour. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, salt and baking powder. Place the olive oil, rice malt syrup and the milk in a blender and blend until combined. Add to the flour mixture and stir well. Fold in the apple chunks and the Brazil nuts and stir gently until they are incorporated into the batter (which should be rather thick). Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake for approximately 1 hour (use the wooden stick test for donness). Let cool before removing the cake from the pan. Enjoy!  

I think apple crumble is one of the my favourite treats. Fruit crumbles in general are great. They are delicious and economical, it takes less than one hour to make them and they can be served warm or cold. I had the best time when I was living in England, going from place to place trying to find the perfect apple crumble. Actually, they all were perfect to me, I can’t remember having one that I didn’t like. Crumble is not a typical Italian dessert, and that’s the reason why I had to have as much as I could before coming back to Italy. Now that I’ve been here a while, I make my own crumbles. I’ve always used wholemeal flour, because white crumbles don’t taste right to me anymore (if you get used to whole grain it’s hard to go back to refined flours). For lighter crumbles I also substitute butter or vegan margarine with either corn oil or extra virgin olive oil. In this recipe I mix the two, so that none of them confers a strongly marked flavour to the crumble. In this healthy pear and apple version, I almost entirely replace wholemeal with organic corn flour, which makes the crumble unbelievably sweet and fragrant. For this recipe I used organic ingredients.

Ingredients (makes 6-8 servings):

For the filling

3 Bartlett pears, peeled, cored, and sliced

3 Golden Delicious apples, peeled, cored, and sliced

juice of 1 lemon

¼ cup muscovado sugar

ginger powder (to taste)

For the crumble

1 cup corn flour

½ cup wholemeal flour

¼ cup muscovado sugar

¼ teaspoon whole sea salt

¼ cup corn oil

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

juice of 1 lemon

ginger powder (to taste)

Heat oven to 150° C and lightly grease a baking pan.

Filling

In a large bowl, combine pear slices, apple slices, sugar, lemon juice and ginger. Mix well, transfer the fruit mixture to the baking pan and bake at 150° for 20 minutes.

Crumble

In a medium-sized bowl, combine the corn flour, wholemeal flour, sugar and salt. Mix well ensuring that everything is combined. Add lemon juice and oil. Rub everything together using your fingers until the oil has been evenly dispersed through the flour and the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. If the mixture happens to be too dry and powdery, add some more oil and lemon juice.

Assembling the crumble

Remove the pear and apple filling from the oven and arrange the crumble randomly on top of the filling. Sprinkle with ground ginger. Bake for another 20 minutes until golden.

Serving suggestion

Cold or warm, this crumble is good on its own…but you might as well try it topped with non-dairy cream or soy yogurt.