Apple Crumble (not at all) like Mama used to make..

Apple crumble. The modern version of the apple tart, something that every Irish Mammy has a recipe for, or at least was made bake in Home Economics about twenty times! This is something that my Irish Mammy taught me how to bake from when I was quite small, about seven or eight. I even have pictures of it, how cute am I... However, time moves on and Spanish, who lives with me in Dublin, loves her crumble! Because of all the apples that I had after coming home from Portlaoise, I thought the only rational thng to do is make a quick crumble.

Ingredients

• Apples! (I like to use a good few, this time around I used some softer ones that had been picked from a neighbours tree, but cooking apples tend to give it that extra tartness!)
• 4oz Flour
• 1oz porriage oats
• 5oz of sugar, plus a bit more for the apples
• 6oz of cold butter, chopped up into small pieces

1. So I started off first by cleaning all the apples in some cold water and then chopping them into segments. Generally I would peel them and then segment them, but because of the beautiful colours of the skin, I chose to leave them on this time! (Plus, in a moment of "'I've been cooking all day madness", it wasn't until I had half of them chopped that I thought about the skins!) 
2. Pop these into your casserole dish and sprinkle very liberally with sugar. I didn't use too much as the apples I used were quite sweet, but when using cooking apples, they definitely need a fair amount of sugar.
3. The next thing is your crumble. Now what I like to do with this is bung the whole lot in a mixing bowl, which would be flour, butter, sugar and oats and just get my hands in there! I'm not sure the technical term for this is, but basically rub the dry ingredients into the butter til you get something with a consistency of breadcrumbs. This happens much easier with cold butter, cold hands, and a light touch, but of course, none of those things are at all required, so do go holding pieces of ice in order to cool the hands down!  
4. Then clean off your mucky hands and spread the crumble on top of the apples, and into the oven it goes at 180 degrees until the crumble is  golden brown and the fruit is bubbling! 

As you may have noticed, there is no finished product picture... This is because I took the dish out of the oven with a wet tea towel, which of course, got very hot very quickly, and I proceeded to drop the dish on top of the cooker, resulting in one broken casserole dish and an apple crumble that needed to be saved. So while this is not the most professional of pictures, at least you get an idea of all the many things that can go wrong when baking!