Blackberry Crisp

Desserts are a bit tricky for me since I'm not supposed to eat eggs, dairy or wheat and it seems that almost all desserts include those. With my family coming for dinner, and not wanting to give them fruit salad for the hundredth time, I decided to make an effort to find a dessert I could actually eat. Finally I resolved that a little bit of butter wouldn't kill me and selected this Blackberry Crisp recipe from Nigella Lawson's book, Nigella Express. I suppose the butter could have been substituted with margarine but with everything I've read about the transfats in margarine causing heart disease and clogging your arteries, I thought butter was the lesser of the two evils!

This blackberry crisp is so easy to make and tasted gorgeous. I used frozen fruit since the fresh variety were so expensive - of course I defrosted the berries before preparing the dish since I knew there would be a lot of liquid released as they defrosted and I didn't want the topping flooded with juice. Although the name is blackberry crisp, I mixed blackberries and raspberries to add a bit more variety. As I don't have any normal flour in my house, I used spelt flour instead and again it didn't seem to make any difference to the taste. The one thing I did forget to do was take a photo of my finished dish...so this is Nigella's photo, although mine really did look very similar.

Try it, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

Ingredients

125g butter

60g jumbo oats

40g flaked almonds

30g sunflower seeds

70g flour

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (or ginger if you prefer)

75g soft light brown sugar

500g blackberries

50g caster sugar

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees / gas mark 6.

2. Melt the butter in a pan and put aside.

3. Combine the oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, flour, cinnamon and brown sugar in a bowl.

4. Tip the berries into a wide, shallow baking dish (about 750ml capacity), sprinkle the caster sugar over them and tumble them about to mix.

5. Stir the melted butter into the dry oat mixture and spoon it on top of the berries - you don't need to fully cover them.

6. Bake in the oven for 25 minutes and serve with ice-cream.

Enjoy!