Apple crumble and cardamom biscuits

[AmandaG]

With a lot of flour, caster sugar, not much shopping in, and time to spare, I decided to look around for some easy recipes to try.

I've got lots of apples which aren't going to keep for much longer, so I stewed some with water  and a little bit of sugar yesterday, to go with porridge. Of course there was stewed apple left today. Luckily I found some small ramekins (probably came with some sort of M&S dessert at one time) just big enough to make small individual desserts.

I added a sprinkle of ground cinnamon to the apple and spooned it into the ramekins first. I managed to throw together a crumble topping using almost equal parts plain flour and caster sugar,  rubbing a small amount of butter and a drizzle of vegetable  oil (only got a limited amount of butter left) into the mixture until it got the consistency of breadcrumbs. It made a lot more than expected, enough for quite a thick crumble topping on top of the stewed apple in each of the ramekins. They browned quickly in about 20 minutes in a hot oven (gas mk 7 I believe) and went pleasantly crispy on top.

As a bonus, I was left with enough of the sweet crumble mixture in the mixing bowl to make a cookie dough, with the addition of a few drops of water and some extra flour, so I could roll them out onto a floured surface. Thanks to a historical recipes phase I went through years ago, I've made biscuits flavoured with cardamom before. The contents of a single cardamom pod ground up and added to the mixture is enough to give plenty of flavour to the sweet dough. They took a little over 10 mins to cook in the same hot oven, but need to be left to cool and harden when taken out of the oven.

[BelAnna]

On 12/04/2020 at 22:33, AmandaG said:

With a lot of flour, caster sugar, not much shopping in, and time to spare, I decided to look around for some easy recipes to try.

I've got lots of apples which aren't going to keep for much longer, so I stewed some with water  and a little bit of sugar yesterday, to go with porridge. Of course there was stewed apple left today. Luckily I found some small ramekins (probably came with some sort of M&S dessert at one time) just big enough to make small individual desserts.

I added a sprinkle of ground cinnamon to the apple and spooned it into the ramekins first. I managed to throw together a crumble topping using almost equal parts plain flour and caster sugar,  rubbing a small amount of butter and a drizzle of vegetable  oil (only got a limited amount of butter left) into the mixture until it got the consistency of breadcrumbs. It made a lot more than expected, enough for quite a thick crumble topping on top of the stewed apple in each of the ramekins. They browned quickly in about 20 minutes in a hot oven (gas mk 7 I believe) and went pleasantly crispy on top.

As a bonus, I was left with enough of the sweet crumble mixture in the mixing bowl to make a cookie dough, with the addition of a few drops of water and some extra flour, so I could roll them out onto a floured surface. Thanks to a historical recipes phase I went through years ago, I've made biscuits flavoured with cardamom before. The contents of a single cardamom pod ground up and added to the mixture is enough to give plenty of flavour to the sweet dough. They took a little over 10 mins to cook in the same hot oven, but need to be left to cool and harden when taken out of the oven.

Yum! Those apple crumbles and biscuits sound delicious.