Recipe: Try this tasty spiced plum and blackberry crumble

As summer turns to autumn and chilled desserts seem less appealing, it can be comforting to revisit the traditional recipes of our culinary heritage.

My husband has accused me of making crumbles too often when we have family and friends round for a meal but I love them. They’re so adaptable and taste so good.

I like the combination here of plum and blackberries with warming spices and hazelnuts, but you can use plums alone, or swap them for blackberry and apple, or just apples. And there’s one big advantage: you can make the filling and topping a day or more ahead and bring them together just before you want to eat, giving you more time to spend with family and friends.

A few notes

The overnight steep is essential to allow the spice flavours to infuse into the filling.

If you want instant results, use half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon instead of the whole spices and maybe a pinch of ground cloves, omitting the star anise.

That would be a shame, though, as it marries so well with the fruit.

The weight given in the recipe is for pitted plums.

When I prepared mine, 1kg of plums gave me 800g stoned weight, so reckon on losing about 20%, depending on how hard your plums are to pit.

Of course, you can keep the stones in, but this is one dish where I don’t want to be playing tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor.

I used skinned, ready toasted hazelnuts.

To prepare them from scratch, preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.

When the oven is hot, set a timer to five minutes. Put the hazelnuts in a high-sided baking tray and roast until browned, checking often, as they burn easily.

The traditional method for skinning them is to put them, still warm, into a clean tea towel and rub them.

It’s laborious.

A much better method – taught to me by my friend and co-cookery tutor Steph Clubb – is to whizz them in a salad spinner. Genius.

I cooked my crumble in a round, ovenproof earthenware dish which is 22cm in diameter and 5cm deep.

You can make individual portions instead, but again, don’t add the topping until just before you cook them. If you’d like to freeze them, put the topping in a bag and freeze it separately.

Spiced plum and blackberry crumble

Ingredients for the filling

Around 800g-1kg dark, pitted plums and blackberries in about a 2:1 ratio

3 heaped tbsp soft light brown sugar (plus more, to taste)

1/2 cinnamon stick

2 star anise

For the topping

100g butter

100g plain (all purpose) flour

100g Demerara sugar

3/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1 heaped tbsp porridge oats

50g chopped toasted hazelnuts (I like mine rubbly and nubbly but go for the texture you like)

Method

Put the stoned plums and blackberries in a bowl, stir in the soft light brown sugar, cover and if you have time, leave to macerate.

Make the crumble topping: put the flour, butter, ground cinnamon and sugar in a food processor and whizz until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs (don’t overdo it, some clumping is fine, but you don’t want boulders). Alternatively, rub it in between the fingertips. Tip into a bowl, stir through the oats and nuts, cover and set aside in the fridge.

Put the macerated fruit (or if you didn’t have time, simply the fruit and sugar and a tiny splash of water) in a saucepan and add the whole spices. Cook on a low heat until the juices run and you can smell the spice aroma – about 10 minutes. Don’t let the fruit break up.

Check the sweetness and add more sugar if necessary – I like mine quite tart. Then scoop into a bowl, keeping the spices in the mixture. Cover, cool and refrigerate overnight. You can leave it up to two days if that suits your timings better.

Shortly before you want to eat, heat the oven to 180C/160 fan/350F/Gas Mark 4. Remove the spices from the bowl and discard them. Using a slotted spoon, scoop the fruit into a heat-proof oven dish.

You may find it’s produced too much liquid.

In north America it’s usual to thicken the juices in fruit pies and crumbles/crisps with cornflour (cornstarch) but I prefer mine unadulterated and keep any extra to pour over ice cream or my breakfast porridge another day – the choice is yours.

Sprinkle the crumble mixture over the fruit and cook for 25-30 minutes until golden brown and bubbling. Allow to cool for 10 minutes before serving with cream, ice cream or crème fraîche. Oh, alright, or custard.

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