playdough and treacle

Ok so every sunday a different team cook traditional food from their nation. This is your chance to show off your cooking skills, be a team player, and be patriotic, now you know me...re-read this statement. Ok i know really its about the cooks having a day off you get to skive the fridge of spanish church (or if your a particularly possitive person you get to have fun and good food.)

Now after so enjoying apple crumble and custard for the last few years whenever i was away from home or in living in sydney or at the infamous chicken dinner theres nothing better than hot apple crumble and custard (yes before you bombard me i know i said pie is well better than cumbles in my best manc accent but im repenting and changing my hipocritical tune to crumble)

So being the well organised soul who never does anything last minute;) i ran to the internet cafe after a day in madrid to print out a receipe and leg it to the super-duper market before the world here stops for sunday and closes everything except a few select bars where people get manchester-drunk with their families and friends. Now being a spanish super market they didnt have much sugar so i (being a dorris with no phone and everyone at the base out at the morrocan night i should have been at an hour before) i made the executive decision to buy the cubed brown and worry about it later, all 2 kg of it. Then i bought flour hoping for the best not knowing the word in spanish that i was indeed buying flour and not cornflour selfraising flour or actually some new invention of something new they now harvest and bag on the same isle.

So i started the day buy peeling 4kg of apples (actually i started with an illegal size coffee) then making the crumble, i was still making this crumble by the time they came back from church ( a 2.5hr service!) so my freind helped de-marge the now 2 ton pile of margarine crumple that was in the pan, it was 2 bags of extra flour later that it started to look like crumble (by this point it was looking more and more likely we could have buried a full size adult with that aount of crumble mix) in the meanwhile i have started microwaving that sugar 1kg at a time and smashing it (actually it was a young spanish guy was pounding it for me ;) jon taught me delegation) so i* finally get it finished (*me my two mates and the spaniard) and into the oven it goes. - wouldnt mind but we hadnt equaled those two EXTRA bags of flour with extra sugar so it tasted like playdough. 'they'll just think english food is bland, cover it in custard' my mate said cheerfully.

It was another 3 days before i returned to the bucketlaods of crumble mix with another load of apples 2 PACKETS of brown sugar and a will of iron to make this flippin pudding. Only you know when your giving detailed directions you read the wrong part of the receipe? no? well i put the amount of sugar for the crumble into the apple mix, the entire measuring jug.
The phrase cant cook shouldnt be allowed within 100m of all kitchens springs to mind, with the exception that the crumble was great as a treacle pie, lets just pray they never go to england and taste the real thing eh.