Rhubarb Crumble

With the rhubarb plants going crazy at the moment, I thought it was time to find some motivation and make a crumble. I've loved crumble since I was a little girl, and was often in charge of rubbing butter into flour with my fingertips. As an adult I've played around with the recipe to make it just how I like it.

This afternoon I picked three massive rhubarb stalks. We have two plants that only produce green stalks and one that produces smaller, red ones. They all taste like rhubarb. Here is the crumble that we had for dessert tonight.

3 large stalks rhubarb
approx. 1 cup frozen raspberries
1 tbsp raw sugar
45g chopped butter
1/3 cup wholemeal self-raising flour
1/4 cup soft brown sugar
1/4 cup desiccated coconut
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup almonds
1/3 cup rolled oats

1. Chop rhubarb into 1-2cm chunks and place in a medium saucepan. Sprinkle with raw sugar and stir over medium heat until sugar starts to dissolve. Reduce heat, cover, and stew until rhubarb is soft.
2. Add raspberries and keep over heat until heated through. Remove from heat but keep covered.
3. In the meantime combine butter, brown sugar, flour, coconut, cinnamon and almonds in a food processor. Whiz until combined and almonds are chopped. Stir through rolled oats. (You can rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips, chop the almonds with a knife and stir through the other ingredients if you don't have a food processor.)
4. Preheat oven to 180C. Place rhubarb mixture into an ovenproof bowl and sprinkle crumble over the top. Bake for 30 mins or until lightly browned and crunchy.

 

 

 

Any combination of rhubarb, apple and berries work well. Sometimes if I'm feeling particularly lazy I use a large tin of pie apples, but when you have rhubarb in abundance, rhubarb it is. I served the crumble with custard tonight, but it's really good piping hot with a good quality vanilla ice-cream.