A Crumble for All Seasons

Over 25 years ago, when I was a teenager, I lived and studied in the US, and would come home to Russia for summer vacation.

During those summers, I spent countless hours in the kitchen, watching my mother cook. The strange thing is that I was never watching her to learn something. It was just a way to pass the time, to catch up on all the hours together we missed during the school year, to talk about everything we needed to talk about.

So, when I moved back to Russia and started my adult life in Moscow, and slowly began to learn how to cook and feed myself, I almost never reached for my mother’s recipes. This is partly because most of the stuff she cooked and baked was done instinctively, with no definite recipe. But mostly, I think, it was because I felt that I could never reach the heights of her perfection when it came to things like borsch, stewed cabbage, pilaf, and what not. There were some recipes that I appropriated for baking – but never her “signature” ones.

One of her signature cakes was a simple crumble cake that she still bakes at least once a week and that became a staple of food packages she sent me.

Recently my husband and I were visiting my parents, and her crumble cake was served. And my husband asked, “Do you know how to make it?” Not getting an affirmative reply, he turned to my mother, as she was packing up some leftover cake for us to take with us: “Could you wrap it up in a recipe?”

That’s when it became clear that I would have to learn how to make my mother’s crumble cake – and maybe some of her more elaborate recipes as well.

A crumble cake in Russia is something like banana bread in the US – the varieties are endless, and every avid baker has her “grandmother’s recipe” in their repertoire. It probably is based on the German streusel, the crumbly top that’s put on all sorts of baking products. But unlike in those recipes, the topping is made from the same dough as the rest of the cake.

The great thing about this recipe is its versatility. Crumble cake dough is basically a shortbread pastry, albeit one made with an egg. It can be made with butter, margarine, or lard. In the leaner Soviet times, it was only made with margarine, as butter was reserved for buttercream or for slathering atop bread. And the filling can be any kind of jam or preserves, or even some tvorog mixed with sugar. It’s especially great with tart jams, such as cherry plum preserves or St. Dalfour’s orange and ginger marmalade.

Mother’s Crumble Cake

ingredients
¾ cups of sugar
1 egg
1 cup of room-temperature butter
½ tsp of baking powder and some salt
2 cups of flour, sifted

Whip the sugar and egg together until well-combined, and then add in the softened butter and mix thoroughly.

Next, stir the baking powder and salt into the flour and slowly incorporate the dried ingredients into the wet, then knead the dough. It should be pliable and non-sticky and form into a ball (you can add a bit more flour if need be).

Divide the dough into two parts: put one-third of the dough (shaped like a disc) in the freezer for about 10 minutes, to firm it up. Spread the remaining two-thirds to fit the bottom of a cake pan (9x13-inch or similar). The high butter content means that it’s unlikely to stick to anything, but you can use parchment paper to line the bottom of pan if you like.

Spread your favorite filling on top of the pastry layer. Then take the dough you placed in the freezer and use a grater to spread crumbles of dough on top of your filling. It should cover the whole cake, though some filling will be visible, and that is just fine.

Bake at 400° F for 25-30 minutes.

Both my husband and I like our crumble cake to be just a tiny bit crispy, so if you fall in this camp, you may need to add a few minutes to your cooking time.

Remove from the oven, allow to cool, and cut into squares that are served directly from the pan. This signature cake keeps really well for a few days in any closed container, if it lasts that long.