Apple Crumble and Banana Crumble

I made apple crumble today! :D my mom used to make it once in a while, and it tasted so good! And since I had a few apples to spare, might as well try it myself, right?

Ingredients

• melted butter, to grease
• approx 1 3/4 cups of plain flour
• 1 1/2 tbsp ground cinnamon
• 180g butter, chilled and cubed
• 2/3 cups brown sugar
• 4 apples
• 1/2 tbsp caster sugar

Instructions

Preheat oven at 190 Celcius.

Use the melted butter to grease your ovenproof dish.

Combine the flour and 1 tbsp ground cinnamon in a bowl. Add butter and rub the butter into the flour using your fingertips, until it looks like coarse breadcrumbs. If it turns out like dough no matter how hard you try though, add more flour to the mix! Stir in brown sugar.

Take off the skin of the apples, take out the core and cut the apples into bite-sized pieces (or into 1.5cm wide wedges if you prefer). Place them into the dish. Combine the caster sugar and the remaining 1/2 ground cinnamon and mix well, coating the apples.

Bake it in the oven for about 25-30 minutes, but check it during the 20 minute mark to make sure it doesn't burn. When cooked, the cumbed topping will be golden andthe apples are tender but still hold their shape when tested with a knife.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or cold custard :D



Also, apparently the best apples to use for any crumbles or pies/tarts are Golden delicious, jonagold, lady williams and sundowner, but any apples are fine if you can't find any!

You can also substitute the apples for bananas to have banana crumble instead, or even mix them both! :D


Below are pictures for banana crumble, which my mom made sometime early this year:






And lastly, enjoy!~ :D

Beef Burger

In this post I shall show you all how to make easy but tasty and HEAVENLY beef burger patty :D It really is very simple to make and you can be as flexible as you want with the recipe depending on your tastes!

But here's my recipe, you can change it any way you like depending on how you want it:

Ingredients:

The base ingredients (not to be altered at all):

• minced meat (depending on how much you would like per patty, in the photo it is 250 grams split into two = each patty is approx 125 grams)
• one egg yolk (to bind the whole thing)

The other ingredients (this is per half a kilo of minced meat):

• 1 tbsp thyme leaves, fresh or dry, minced
  
• 1 tbsp oregano
• 1 small onion, minced finely
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced finely
• 2-3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2-3 tbsp tomato sauce

Mix all of the ingredients together and lastly add the egg yolk to bind. Roll it up into balls and they are to be flattened to become your beef patty.

This is very important, to put it in the fridge for at least a half hour before frying because this enables the beef to not crumble easily when you fry. Believe me I have tried before!

When you fry, fry it on a medium-low heat to avoid cooking the outside too fast, because that would mean that the inside would cook much slower and you'd have the outside tasting like charcoal heh heh. When it is cooked, leave it aside for a few minutes. This will make sure that the juice is retained inside the burger.

Also, my tip is, before you fry your patty, make your patty as flat as possible, if you have a roller, use it, because when you fry it the patty will retract and shrink, thus that is why you see my patty is small but very fat.


Others:

As for the bread, you can use any burger bread roll you like. What I did with mine was I put some olive oil in a pan, put a heaped teaspoon of butter in it and I fried the inside of the bread on that pan. After I take it out, I take a half-cut garlic and I just rub it on the hot surface of the bread, to give it that garlicy aroma and taste. Mmm!

If you love onions, what you can do is you slice it in the middle to get the onion rings, and then you pan-fry it on a non-stick pan with little or no oil at all. Leave it to caramelize, or turns brown and soggy. It tastes great!

And the beauty of a burger is: You can top it with anything you want! Sliced cheese, mozzarella cheese, pickles, etc. Try it with your favourite combinations :D you'll get hooked! And it's easy to make too.

You can keep burger patty in the fridge for two days though, and in the freezer for about 3 days. It's not good to keep burger patty in the freezer for too long though because it might get crumbly.

And lastly, enjoy! :D