Why Struggle With Pie Crust? Make This Instead

I love a good fruit dessert. I’ll choose pie over cake any day of the week. But I have always struggled with making a golden, flaky pie crust. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, when my very best friend taught me her tried-and-true pie crust-making secrets, that I could make good pies, reliably.

But in the meantime, I had discovered crisps, crumbles, buckles, cobblers, and slumps – and I was off to the races, turning out amazing fruit desserts for every family and social function. Although all of these contain fruit, it is the toppings that allow you to tell them apart.

A crisp and a crumble are essentially the same thing: fruit topped with a mixture of flour, nuts, cereal, butter and sugar. This topping completely covers the fruit in a crisp, but in a crumble it is scattered randomly over the surface of the fruit.

A buckle is actually more of a cake, with a lot of fruit mixed into the batter. The most popular of these is made with blueberries. Buckles also have a streusel topping, like a crisp or crumble, but when on top of the cake batter, the streusel causes a buckling effect, hence the name.

USE THE RED NEXT PAGE LINK BELOW FOR THE RECIPE AND INSTRUCTIONS.

Quick Tip:  Baking is a science, cooking is an art. Chemical reactions take place in baking that do not happen in cooking. In order for your baked goods to turn out properly, you must use the proper measuring technique to get an exactly accurate amount for each ingredient. Measuring your flour incorrectly, especially, can result in disaster. To measure the flour AND oats in this recipe correctly, do NOT scoop them out of their container with your measuring cup. Instead, spoon them into the cup. Once you have overfilled the measuring cup, take the back of a knife and scrape the excess back into the container. Do NOT tap or shake your measuring cup while measuring and do NOT pack your ingredient into the cup with the spoon. Doing any of these will result in too much of your ingredient and ruin your results.

Recipe courtesy of Sally at Sally’s Baking Addiction, photo courtesy of thesaltedcookie.com