On Fall Baking

Featuring a recipe for an all-purpose crumble!

Happy Friday! This is the weekly recipe post for paid subscribers, and I’ve been eating it by the handful. On Tuesday, all readers will receive a missive from my annual re-read of the Harry Potter series. There is a hard stop ahead, which sucks, but hey: it’s this or endless ads on a website, so here we are.

I love cooking all year long, but I tend to take a break in the summer. This summer especially, we ate lots of girl dinners, salads, and plates of vegetables with dips. The oven stayed off, the house stayed cool, and we made good headway on the produce I was lugging home by the tote-full every weekend. Life was good!

To clarify, life is still good! It’s just colder. And there is a switch in my brain that has flipped with the weather. All of the sudden, I feel compelled to pull cookbooks off the shelf and cook. Just as the trees are going dormant, a part of me is reawakening, ready to roll up my sleeves and dig out the cake tins I haven’t used in months to attempt another layer cake. Cue a Michael Scott gif:

I jest (mostly)! Cakes and I get along much better than we used to. Watch for the recipe that helped me turn the tide in a few weeks.

As I was catching up on the new season of Bake Off, I was thinking about texture in baking. It was a pivotal moment for me when, at age 25, I realized that even things like cookies and cakes needed to have a good balance of crispy-crunchy and ooey-gooey, much in the way that they need salt to balance sugar. It’s part of why there’s an all-edge brownie pan out in the world—the crust is the perfect foil to the under-baked middle. There’s some science here, I’m sure of it.

The recipe I’m sharing this week was an experiment in texture: could I make something—not a full dessert, mind you, but a dessert component—that could be added to a bunch of different things to make them that much more interesting? The answer, dear reader, is yes. During the course of the week that this hung around in a leftover container, it went on pancakes, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, morning yogurt bowls, and ice cream. And this is just the beginning! I have big plans for this crumble, including pie crust, cookies, and even—gasp—a crunchy pumpkin bread topping. Maybe even a salad, just to be diabolical! The pastabilities are endless!

Make a batch of this and see where the adventure takes you. Don’t forget to let me know where it ends up (and who you’re rooting for in Bake Off!).

All-Purpose Fall Crumble