apple crumble slice

apple crumble slice

• 5 Feb 2018

I had dinner with friends during the Australia Day Long Weekend and as is customary, I brought along dessert. My friends' son dislikes overly sweet, creamy or chocolate flavoured desserts so I normally bring along something lemon flavoured or containing apple. I don't like to bring the same dessert twice if I can help it, so I had to come up with something new and in a hurry.




I decided to make an apple crumble slice inspired by a picture I saw online. I used the apple filling from the Country apple cake recipe which uses canned apple slices, with the addition of some sultanas I'd soaked in tea to plump them up. If you can't buy pie apple, you'll need to stew about 1 kilo of green cooking apples before making the recipe and you could toss the sultanas into the warm apple, avoiding the soaking process.The topping and crumble came from the lemon curd shortbread recipe found in the Cook and Baker cookbook. I put the slice together and baked it hoping the elements would work together. 




There was probably too much filling for the tin but I squeezed it all in any way. The filling amount would work perfectly in an 8 x 12 inch slice tin but you'd need to increase the shortbread mixture by 50%. 

Here's the recipe for you. For all my recipes I use a 250ml cup and a 20 ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60g eggs. My oven is a conventional gas oven so if your oven is fan forced you may need to reduce the oven temperature by 20ºC.

Apple Crumble Slice - makes 8 slices

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour

pinch salt

150g caster sugar

185g unsalted butter

1 tsp vanilla

Apple Filling

800g tin pie apple

⅓ cup caster sugar

1 tsp grated lemon rind

¼ cup sultanas soaked in tea for 20 minutes, then drained

Icing sugar for dusting

Method

Tip: You can make both the dough and the apple filling in advance and keep refrigerated for up to 2 days.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Sift the flour with the salt and set to one side. In a large bowl cream the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Mix in the flour to form a soft dough. Press just over half the mixture into the base of a 20cm x 20cm lightly greased tin lined with non-stick baking paper. Wrap the remaining dough in plastic wrap and store in the fridge. Bake for 20–25 minutes or until a light golden brown.

To make the apple filling, combine the pie apple, the sugar, the lemon rind and sultanas in a large bowl. Spoon the filling over the cooked base in an even layer. Sprinkle or grate the remaining mixture over the apples and cook in the oven for 35– 40 minutes or until golden brown. Allow to cool in the tin, dust with icing sugar and cut into slices to serve.




I cut it into 8 slices so I could take a few photos before driving across the bridge for dinner. Thankfully I did because the slice was devoured in record time. The ingredients may be simple but when baked, the slice was absolutely delicious. The base was buttery, the filling tart with lemon. It's not overly sweet so if you like sweet desserts you might want to increase the amount of sugar in the filling but I liked it just the way it was. I can't wait to make it again.



See you all again next week with some more baking from my kitchen.

Bye for now,

Jillian