Blackberry Almond Crumble

On Friday in the morning before it got too hot I made a blackberry almond crumble. I roughly followed this recipe in the food network magazine, but I used oats instead of cornmeal and blackberries instead of blueberries. It turned out delicious!

Blackberry Almond Crumble
Filling:
4 cups Blackberries
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbsp flour
Crumble:
3/4 cup chopped almonds
1/2 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
pinch of salt
7 tbsp softened butter
2 tbsp cold butter (for top of crumble)

Directions:
1. Preheat oven 375, grease your pan.
2. Load 4 cups berries into your pan. Sprinkle sugar over top of berries, and tablespoon of flour.
3. In a separate bowl mix the crumble ingredients together with your fingers until the butter is incorporated nicely.
4. Evenly spread the crumble over the top of the berries.
5. Dot the top of the crumble with 2 tbsp of butter divided. Bake for 40-45 minutes until golden and bubbling.

For the magazine recipe click here. Also linked to Making Friends Monday, Meet Me Monday, Mingle Mondays, Tasty Tuesday, Tempt My Tuesday, Tuesdays at the Table.

Birthday Breakfast

I try to make birthdays a big deal, but my husband really does a fantastic job of kind of ruining them. He always knows his presents ahead of time because he doesn't want anything that isn't TOTALLY specific; I usually have to get his help in order to get the present for him. This year he has a new obsession which is a dual sport motorcycle, essentially a dirt bike that can also be ridden on the road. I am not that much of a fan of motorcycles, they are dangerous after all. But with his long commute you can't argue with $3 a week in gas. Plus when he drives the motorcycle I get the Prius and Stella (our beautiful '87 Volvo station wagon) gets to take a break. For his new obsession he wanted a new jacket, one with armor in it, which considering how motorcycles are death traps anything to make him safer is a good idea.

I also try to do/make anything that the birthday boy would like. At first for breakfast he said he just wanted eggs on toast (he isn't a big breakfast guy) and then I brought up cinnamon rolls. He thought that sounded great. I found a knock off recipe for cinnabon cinnamon rolls using the dough setting on my bread maker. I looked into the possibility of doing the delay setting so that I could do all the ingredients at night before going to bed, set the timer, and it would start on its own and be ready by the time we woke up –the dough that is. This was not possible because it called for warm milk, melted butter, eggs etc. All things that you can't have sitting out overnight. So my timer was set like always for school wake up time, 6:00 am (let's face it my daughter wakes up at 6:30 give or take a few minutes every day regardless so it isn't a big stretch to get up at 6:00am but humor me a bit) and moseyed on downstairs to make it while I was barely awake. Then Molly woke up shortly after I gave her pancakes with strawberries, she wolfed them down I think she ended up having three! Then the next thing I know Brian is awake and downstairs way before I expected him, we are just not a family of late sleepers apparently. He wanted to get an early jump on his day of riding his bike, so I had to speed the process of the cinnamon rolls up a bit, but they were still very good. I think I have the cinnamon rolls down, they were excellent.

Cinamon rools after they baked before the icing.

Brian enjoying a bit with coffee.