Crumbles are pretty much impossible to miss and a great way to turn fruits (most fruits are suitable; apples, pears, and peaches are classic) and butter into a good cake. This one is pimped with chocolate chips, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and lemon juice. They are all worth it but, you can cut all of them if you want to keep things simple (or do not have them on hand).

• 100g of flour (you can easily turn the grams into cups and half cups: it is the respective proportions that matter)
• 100g of salted butter (you can also use unsalted butter and had some salt, the result is identical, but do not omit the salt)
• 50g of sugar
• 2 large pears
• some good cooking chocolate (no need for a sweet one, 70% cacao does a good job, also I like to get a chocolate bar and cut it into smallish chips, you get better quality chocolate and bigger chips)
• some cinnamon
• some vanilla extract
• some lemon juice

• peel the pears, dice them, and put them on the bottom of your baking dish (I use a Pyrex square one), you want enough pears to garnish the bottom of the dish with about one centimeter of pears
• add some lemon juice on top, not much just a spoonful so that the pears are finely coated
• cut your chocolate into chips and sprinkle them on top of the layer of pears (no need for much, it is not a chocolate cake!)

• mix the flour and sugar in a large bowl
• add some cinnamon (enough for people to identify that there is something but not enough for them to guess it is cinnamon)
• add some vanilla extract (same recommendation as for the cinnamon)
• cut the butter into dices and add it (let it rest at room temperature while you are doing the fruit layer, to make it a bit softer and easier to mix)
• mix the ingredients with one hand (you want to grab them in your hand, squeeze and restart until you have the texture of crumbly sand with large chunks of cake but no unmixed butter, the butter will soften at the contact of your body temperature, do not overmix: it should not become a perfect single blob of batter)
• sprinkle chunks of batter on top of the fruit layer (if you have flour left in the bottom of the bowl, you can dump it on the cake, you want to cover all of it with an equal thickness of chunks of the batter), look at pictures of crumble to get a feel for the appearance and texture you are going for

• cook for about 25 minutes at 350F (or 180C) (cooking time will vary, you want it to be golden on top but don’t need more than that)
• let it get down to room temperature before serving (it is also great cold, after a night in the fridge, the next day)

Not much, the basic crumble batter is a classic that you find all over the internet. The additions are mine but they follow fairly standard practices.