We're eating lighter at the moment here at Struan Farm. It's summer, it's (meant to be) hot, we're eating later after working outside until late, and we're trying to move ourselves beyond all the holiday excesses. But that doesn't mean we don't have dessert after dinner, especially on the weekend.
I decided to use our bounty of ripe plums to make a plum crumble, tossing in some fresh cherries and blueberries to add sweetness, variety, and colour. Crumbles are super easy to make, can be adjusted for the number of people you need to feed, and work well with pretty much any type of fruit you might have on hand, canned/tinned or fresh. (Okay, I'm not sure bananas or citrus work, but all types of stone fruit, berries, apples, pears.) Obviously we're at the peak of summer right now so I've used fresh fruit.
The fruit is tossed with some sugar and put into a baking dish. A purist might grease the dish with a bit of butter, and also add some flour or cornstarch to the fruit to cut the juice. Up to you on both of those things, play around and see what works for you. For the topping I make up my knocked off version of Annabel Langbein's crumble topping from the Free Range Cook. It includes whole grain oats, brown sugar, ground almonds, sliced almonds and flour (pretty much in equal quantities), a bit of mixed spice, and melted butter to bind it all together. If you go overboard and make up too much crumble topping you can freeze the extra in a ziplock bag to use later. As you can see, I haven't made a huge dish here, basically enough for two generous portions.
Bake in a preheated 180C oven until the top is browned and the fruit is bubbling. This can be served warm with yogurt, or softly whipped cream or ice cream if you're in a more decadent mode. At the moment we've sworn off decadent. Briefly.
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