VeganMoFo 2015 #20: A tale of two crumbles.

20. Veganise an old family recipe.

Okay, first up I must own up to doing the easiest veganisation imaginable, which is replacing butter with vegan butter or margarine. In my case, I used Nuttelex. I know, lame, but it is all about the story!

Last year my mum put together a little booklet of family recipes from the extended family (including a few vegan contributions from me), which included some recipes from my grand mother. One of these was apple crumble. Mum also used to make apple crumble a lot for us as a kid. So I decided to make this recipe. A few days after I made it, Mum was even able to dig up Mama's (my name for my grandmother) old recipe book, so I could see it written in her own hand!



But wait... why does it say Nan next to it? That is my mum's name! Turns out, rather than being passed down from my grandmother to my mum, my mum actually learned this recipe in her domestic science class at school in 1961, and bought it home, where Mama also used it. My mum was able to dig up her original recipe that she wrote down at school!



That is pretty cool! Often we we had crumble growing up it was made with tinned apples, however I stewed the apples as required by the original recipe. So easy. I must remember this to make my own unsweetened applesauce. Let's look at the finished product. It was very tasty! I ate it with a tiny bit of So Delicious ice cream that I had left.







However, as the title might suggest, there is more to the story. I was munching away on my crumble, enjoying it a lot, but thinking... hmmm... I seem to remember there was a different crumble that I used to make when I was younger... So I hit up Mama's recipe book and also my mum's box of recipes on index cards and indeed, there was another. So I decided I had to make that too! Sometimes VeganMoFo is so hard! Hee hee.



This crumble was based on brown sugar, nuttelex and self raising flour. The recipe called for nutmeg, but I used a heaping half-teaspoon of cinnamon instead. I was super lazy given that this was just a topping recipe, and combined tinned pie apples and tinned pineapple chunks that were taking up room in my cupboard for the base.



You can see that this is a much darker crumble, because of the brown sugar. The brown sugar also caused a caramelised layer to form between the fruit and the crumble, which was pretty yummy! Great crumble. However I can definitely say that tinned apples have nothing on homemade apples, they were kind of flavourless. Thank goodness there was pineapple in there!



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post: Month of Gizmo



Pretty Kitty!