Kitchen Experiment

Been a bit of a wizard in the kitchen tonight, and I've made apple crumble. I still had apples left from when I went to Nagano with Helen and decided that they needed to be eaten. I had moaned so much about not having winter comfort food that I decided to make apple crumble. I had the apples, and sugar in the cupboard. All I needed was some flour and a dish to cook it in. The dish was easy, a small ceramic bowl from Lion D'or for 100 yen. Flour was more difficult. The bakery section in Lion D'or was full of baking sets; boxes full of premixed, dry ingredients which, with some milk and mixing, would trun into fairy cakes or chocolate brownies. But what of the most basic ingredient, flour? Well I couldn't see any at all. Plenty of doughnut mix and browne mix but no flour. I walked away and continued shopping til I had an idea; what about the bags of pancake mix? The instructions on the back of these showed that you needed to add egg and milk to the dry pancake mix. I know pancakes are just flour, milk and egg. So, if you need to add the milk and egg to pancake mix to make pancakes, wouldn't the pancake mix be, essentially, just flour? I bit the bullet and bought the mix.

Back at home, I peeled then sliced my apple and put it in a pan with some sugar to stew on the hob. I only have a toaster oven and reckoned that it needed as much help cooking my dessert as it could get. I made the crumble out of butter and pancake mix and gave it a taste. It was sweet so sugar must also be included in the mix. So far so good. I put the stewed apple in my new ceramic bowl and covered the fruit with the pancake-mix crumble. Then I put it in the pre-heated toaster oven and I set about making my tea. I had to turn down the oven when the crumble started to turn too dark a brown too quickly, which was to be expected if the heating element is only three inches away. So I left the crumble on a low heat and returned to it after I eaten my main meal.

It certainly looked like crumble, and it smelt like crumble too. I placed a serving in a bowl with some ice-cream (no custard yet) and found that it tasted like crumble, albeit with a very sweet topping. Nonetheless, it was a success in my book. A couple of changes, more fruit and use of some proper flour perhaps, and this could be perfect.

Maybe I could make a chicken stew too.