My first date with my husband today was a bit unconventional. He lived in Los Angeles and I lived in Brooklyn and our first personal meeting was in my apartment in NYC. His cross-country skiing flight was delayed and I had so much nervous energy that I made a plum crunch cake. When he arrived, I served him a warm disc, and the rest is history (15 years together and 13 years of marriage).
The cake was an adaptation of a proven recipe ina garden, and since then I have made it a million times and a million different ways. The Plum crunchpresented in your 2008 book Back to the basicsBasically a large chic fruit is crispy. It is delicious, but I have adapted it over the years to record different fruits, different diets, different portion sizes and much more.
The best of the recipe? It works every time.
This dessert is so easy to prepare, but tastes complicated and looks delicious rustic. The filling is fruity and sweet, while the surface is butter -like and wonderfully crispy. Every time it’s a winner (just ask my husband). Grab the fruits you have on hand and let your whole house smell incredibly.
Simply recipes / Laurel Randolph
How I do ina garden plum crunch
I will be honest, I rarely make the recipe as written. The results are obviously delicious, but I don’t often have Italian plum plums or crème de cassis at hand, and I find the filling too sweet. Fortunately, it is super easy to adapt.
My preferred way to make it is a mixture of nectarines and plums or apples and pears for a wonderful autumn dessert. Replace the fruit pound for pounds (I sometimes add a little additional fruits, and it does nothing), cut stone fruits with half a customs thick (no need to peel) and cut peeled, shops with a quarter of inches thick. If you are gluten -free, replace the flour in the filling with cornstarch and the flour in the surface with the same amount of gluten -free flour. Nobody will ever know.
For the perfect amount of sweetness I use half a cup of sugar in the filling instead of the recommended one and a half cups. The crème de cassis can be left out or you can exchange them for one or two tablespoons of lemon juice, calvados (for apples) or even bourbon or rum. And if you do not like the walnuts in the crust or cannot eat, replace them with another nut or just leave them out.
This recipe makes a beautiful BIG 9×13 fruit crispy, but it is easy to halve the recipe and bake in a casserole shell of 8×8, 9×9 or similarly large size.
Simply recipes / Laurel Randolph
Other ways to use topping
Let’s real: The best part of this dessert is topping. I find it perfectly crisp, butter -like and sweet, and I use it for many things:
- Half a recipe is the ideal amount for topping a cake. I love an apple or berry cake with a crumble top, and a plum pate (with a butter crust) is always a winner.
- Use topping on beams, especially on fruity, such as raspberry.
- Simply spread out the covering on a lined baking sheet and bake it until you are brownish and crispy. Then they emerge fresh fruit, yogurt, ice cream and much more.
