Baking for Beginners: Pear and Vanilla Crumblepie

Crumblepie crumblepie crumblepie. It's my new favourite made up word. I love pie, but crumble is tasty too. So it's a genius idea to put them together, right? Alas, it wasn't my genius idea. Pear cumblepie is the invention of Bitchin' Camero, and after making it last night, I had to share it with you. It's gooey, treacley and fruity all at once. It's even rather light, considering the slices are as deep as doorstops. You'll get a good 8-10 slices out of this. You'll want to eat them all yourself.

You'll need:

For the pie

• Six pears, peeled and sliced.
• Shortcrust pastry (I used frozen, but you could use Marian's three minute pie crust recipe)
• 50g plain flour
• 100g natural cane sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 vanilla pod
• 1/2 tsp salt

For the crumble topping:

• 80g plain flour
• 80g rolled oats
• 150g brown sugar (I used muscavado)
• 115g butter
• 50 chopped pecans

Make it!

• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
• Split the vanilla pod and add the seeds to a bowl with the rest of the pie ingredients.
• Line a deep pie dish with pastry and fill with tasty pie goodness. You'll have a bit of flour left over, save that for the next step, it's all vanilla-y.
• Add the crumble mix to the same bowl, and mix. Make sure you've got everything all mixed, but it doesn't matter if the butter is still in little pieces, in fact it'll taste super nice.
• Cover the pie with the mixture, making sure you get in all the little gaps.
• Pop in the oven for an hour and serve with cold vanilla custard. Eat, make yummy noises. Feel very very pleased with yourself.

Flickr image from david.nikonvscanon's photostream. It might be tasty, but it's not a very photogenic pie.