Apple Crumble

Last week, I bought a big bag of pink lady apples. I like these apples because they are normally very sweet and very very crunchy. Yes, I said 'normally'. The apples I bought last week were so sour! So, besides making a face that looks like this, what else can you make with a big bag of sour apples?

Apple Crumble!

And because I'm such a cheat, I bought pre-made mini tart shells for the apple crumble. At least I'm an honest cheat huh? But I swear, it must have saved me 2 hours of sweating and trying to press dough EVENLY into an aluminium cup without losing my sanity, patience and head.

So today, all I had to do was pop those babies out of the box, chop up one apple and make the crumble topping. The only thing was, because of our blasted weather, the butter in the crumble kept melting, so I had to keep popping the bowl into the freezer, taking it out to crumble the mixture and then popping it back in before it started melting again. Except for that, it was pretty easy peasy. After DN woke up from his afternoon nap, I told him we were going to bake cakes and he was so happy. The first thing I got him to do was fill the tart shells with apple. And here we have Mr Sneaky caught in the act of eating some of the apples! Because of this, we ran out and I had to cut another apple up!

After that, I told him to add some raisins, cranberries and dried blueberries. He took it upon himself to reward himself for the effort by eating some of the raisins. -_-

Next was the crumble topping. Okay, I have to admit, at this part, my heart started palpitating and I had to take deep breaths as DN sprinkled crumble all over the tray, himself, his chair and the floor. I rotated these two mantras : "Mess can be cleaned. Mess can be cleaned. Mess can be cleaned." and "Ants won't come. Ants won't come. Ants won't come." Of course the buggers came. So I concentrated my efforts on squishing all of them rather than snatching the spoon out of my son's hand and doing it all myself. DIE ANTS DIE!

Here's Mr Messy looking very pleased with his apple crumble tarts.

We baked them for about half an hour before sharing one together for afternoon tea. It was SO delicious! DN would have scoffed down the whole tart if I had not snuck a few bites in for myself.