A warm fruit crumble is such a great thing to throw nonchalantly on the dessert table, all “Yeah, no big deal, these items were laying around the kitchen” without seeming passive aggressive (i.e.: “This was just laying around the kitchen,” while trotting out a 3-foot croquembouche.).
The first fruit crumble I made wasn’t vegan. It’s now a fuzzy memory of butter and flour, and was coincidentally the first thing I ever baked in my current kitchen–this was before my invasion, back when it was my boyfriend’s kitchen and I was stirring everything in a ceramic serving bowl. It was so hot that afternoon that the butter seemed less like it was melting and more like it was dying. (Blueberry crumb bar recipe from Smitten Kitchen here, if you’re so inclined. Mine didn’t survive long enough to cut into individual “bars.”)
The next fruit crumble I baked was vegan. This apple crisp from Hell Yeah It’s Vegan! was swiftly destroyed. No butter, but sugar bordering on decadent. While eating it for dessert, I was preemptively justifying it as “breakfast” because of the apples and oats. In my house, breakfast is whatever I say it is. This all brings me to a vital theoretical question: Is there a difference between a crumble and a crisp? Let’s table this for the next Nobel committee meeting.*
Third fruit crumble: Gwyneth Paltrow’s vegan Flourless Anything Crumble from It’s All Good. Hmmm. This one. This is really what we should be thinking when we’re thinking “dessert” if we want to look anything like Gwyneth Paltrow.
For fruit I used apples and blueberries because they were the cheapest thing at D’Agostino (AKA Super Supreme Scam-ostino). Gwyneth uses quinoa, but I substituted a larger portion of oats because it was on hand and filled out the topping substantially. I do recommend tossing the fruit in some additional cinnamon to lend the flavors a little edge. In summary: this recipe kind of feels like the skinny sister to the other two, who are by no means fat sisters, but this sister is just so discerning that the other sisters couldn’t even compete.
*As this HuffPost investigation would have it, everybody’s a little mixed up with their crumbles/crisps/etc.
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