Crumble of Filth

Here at Heavy Metal Cooking, we're all about the classics, and they don't come much more classic than this.

Any English people reading this have probably eaten this about 240563986 (approximately) times in their lives. Crumble is a very easy way of making a delicious dessert using only a few basic ingredients - flour, sugar, butter and some nice fruit. I've embellished on it a bit here but really that's all you need. For this crumble, I thought the walnuts went really well with the pears, and the sprinkling of oats made a nice crunchy surface. Other fruits that go well with this include apple (obviously), rhubarb (add lots of sugar though), blackberries or a combination thereof. Just don't put raisins in or your crumble will be crap and I will be forced to slap you.

NOTE: I've used two types of sugar here - I used demarara for the crumble because it's crunchy, but I used soft brown sugar to caramelise the pears and give them a nice flavour. It's just a poncey little thing I did, feel free to just use one type.

Ingredients:

• 225g plain flour
• 150g butter
• 110g demarara sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 4 x conference pears
• 2 tbsps cinnamon
  
• 3 tbsps (I guess?) soft brown sugar e.g. muscovado
• Enough porridge oats to sprinkle over the top
• A few walnuts
  

Method:

1. Preheat the oven at 200 degrees.
2. Sieve the flour into a big bowl.
   
3. Mix a pinch of salt into the flour and rub in 110g of the butter with your fingertips until you have a mixture that looks like breadcrumbs (you may find this easier if you get the butter out of the fridge in advance so that it softens). Then mix in the demarara sugar. NOTE: this is basically a pastry mix without the water, so if you wanted to make a pie instead of a crumble you could just add a little bit of very cold water so that it sticks together - however if you do that you should let the pastry sit in the fridge for at least half an hour, or perhaps read a different recipe, e.g. a pie/tart recipe.
   
4. Peel and core your pears and mix them in with the soft brown sugar. I'm not sure exactly how much I used but you want a decent covering. Add some cinnamon according to taste - I like quite a lot but it's up to you.
5. Get a baking dish like the sexy pyrex one in the picture and rub some butter round the edge, then put the pear mixture in. Dot a few little lumps of butter around to aid the caramelisation process, then add the crumbly goodness, making sure the pears are all completely covered. Sprinkle some porridge oats on top and finally scatter a few walnuts over.
6. Bake it in the oven for 40 minutes until the top is golden brown, and serve with a generous blob of vanilla ice cream!