This is another recipe from the British book Vegan Recipes. It's classified as a "pudding," which I suppose refers to the use of bread crumbs as opposed to a pie crust or pastry. I was going to do my best to follow the recipe word for word. I even went so far as to buy white bread. As in "Dietary Fiber 0g" white bread.
I haven't bought an entire loaf of white bread in over ten years. When I was a kid, one of my favorite snacks was a slice of white bread with four thin pats of butter on it, like so:
My mom would say, "Don't you want to toast that?" No, Mommy, the whole point of this snack is that it is cold and soft. If there was honey, or even one of those KFC "Honey Sauce" packets, even better:
(Once we were no longer poor, and I was a latch-key kid, and there was lots of food and little supervision, I could eat five or six of these in a sitting. Another favorite snack was thick slices of Kroger-brand sharp cheddar cheese dunked in Dr. Pepper (the acidity makes the cheese softer). Needless to say, I grew into a rather chubby teenager.)
Speaking of honey, this recipe called for something called "golden syrup," which I had to Google. It's a sugar processing by-product, used by some vegans as a honey substitute. I already had honey, and I wasn't about to go all over town on a quest for "golden syrup." Then there was the matter of the vegan margarine. I found a vegan "buttery spread" at the local market, but why would I eat something with a million ingredients when I could just use actual butter? (Obviously I'm not a vegan.)
The recipe was a bit convoluted. It called for 3 C. fresh white bread crumbs, but I had a hard time crumbling the fresh white bread (it only smushes) so I cut it into roughly 1/4" squares with a serrated knife. I couldn't tell from the wording of the recipe if you were supposed to toast said crumbs in the oven or on the stove, so I just melted 5 tbsp of butter in a skillet and cooked them at medium heat, stirring often with a big plastic fork.
Then, over a saucepan, I peeled tiny strips of zest off two lemons with the serrated knife (I don't have a zester--I wonder how many people have zesters they never use, and here I am always doing it with a knife?). Then I halved the lemons and squeezed the juice into the saucepan over the zest. (This is a good time to scoop the seeds out of the juice with a little spoon.) I then added 4 tbsp of honey and 4 tbsp of sugar. I heated this at a low temperature, stirring constantly, then stirred in the bread crumbs, then set the whole business aside to cool (this is a good time to taste the sweet, sticky bread crumbs while trying not to eat a noticeable amount of them).
Whenever I buy non-organic berries, I like to soak them for a while in cold water. The recipe called for a pound of blackberries. (I only had 13 oz left because a few were very ripe and got eaten right away.) I put the blackberries in a dish to soak while I sliced one pound of apples as thin as I could (I used two delicious Braeburns.) The book said to "process the walnuts very fine," but then didn't say what to do with them. I chopped 1/2 C walnuts roughly with a knife (chopping them fine would have been better, but I gave away my food processor after I cut myself horribly while washing it. I still can't look at one without shuddering.) I mixed the walnuts with the apples because I figured those two flavors go together well.
I didn't know what size dish to use, so I used a greased glass loaf pan. It was just the right size!! You're supposed to alternate "layers" of the different ingredients. I put down blackberries, then bread crumbs, then apples (with some walnuts), then bread crumbs, then more blackberries, more bread crumbs, more apples and walnuts, more bread crumbs, more blackberries, and then finished with bread crumbs.
Here's what it looked like before cooking. (It looked pretty in the light from the windows.):
I cooked it at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Here it is almost done:
I had just made banana bread using my mom's recipe (except I added cinnamon and cardamom this time, which was nice), so I served it alongside the Blackberry Charlotte:
I'm so fancy:
I served this to my mom, who had come to visit the puppies. She said it was very good. My roommate came home a little while later, and was very pleased to see that there was food around. She liked it too, but kept poking at the bread crumbs. "Is there cheese in this?" she asked. "No," I said. "That's bread crumbs toasted in butter and soaked in sugar and honey and lemon juice." "Ohh..." she said, still poking at the crumbs as if she didn't believe me.
The apples came out a bit undercooked (compared to the apples in apple pie) and I'm not entirely sold on the bread crumbs (it would have been easier to simply throw all the fruit and juice and sugar in the dish and top with hand-patted squares of pie crust or just crumbly, unrolled pie dough--that would make it a pandowdy or a cobbler, which is easier and less time-consuming). The flavor was great, though.
B+
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