The ultimate cozy comfort dessert - a quick and easy blackberry apple crisp in a cast iron skillet. A perfect rustic dish to serve to family and friends, making the best use of seasonal fruits and berries. Indulgent with added vanilla bean and cinnamon spice.
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Why you'll love this recipe
- Quick and cozy - an easy one pot homemade dessert. Crumbles and crisps are the absolute best rustic homemade treat. This version packed with seasonal blackberries and apples is a sure winner for your dinner table!
- Fun skillet bake - who doesn't love a little bit of presentation? This recipe uses a cast iron skillet for a simple styled centrepiece. Also making it great to share fresh from the oven.
- Vanilla bean - the secret ingredient here is a vanilla pod. The seeds added to the fruit will accent the flavours, making this dish deliciously decadent for a special sweet treat.
Equipment Notes
This is a super simple recipe, with no specialist equipment required. All you'll need:
- A baking dish - either a skillet or a casserole dish, about 8" or 9" are perfect here, but you can use a wide range of shapes and sizes.
- A large mixing bowl - you'll need at least one mixing bowl, two would be best so that you don't have to worry about any washing up between layers for this crisp.
- Spatula - a spoon or spatula to mix things together.
Ingredient Notes
My Apple and Blackberry Crisp is made in essentially two parts - the filling and the oat topping.
For the filling, you'll need:
- Blackberries - fresh or frozen blackberries will work in this recipe. If using frozen, let these defrost first to avoid uneven baking. You don't normally need to cut or chop these, unless your blackberries are on the larger side - in which case you might want to cut them in half to help them distribute better in the filling.
- Apples - tart, fresh apples are perfect here. Peel, core and slice into thin pieces, just like you would for any apple crisp or crumble.
- Sugar - granulated sugar or caster sugar.
- Lemon juice - the juice of a lemon will give a light zest and tangy freshness to the fruit filling.
- Cornstarch - this will help to thicken the sauce in the filling, especially as it cools down if you'll be serving room temperature.
- Optional: vanilla bean - if you want to give this crisp a little something extra special, adding the scraped seeds from a vanilla pod or a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste to the fruit mixture compliments and accentuates all the flavours!
And then for the topping:
- Light brown sugar - firmly packed measurements. You can use dark brown sugar here, but this will increase the molasses flavour in the overall recipe, which I often find a bit overpowering for the fruits.
- Flour - all purpose flour or plain flour work in this recipe.
- Rolled oats - you can use standard rolled oats (sometimes called porridge oats) in this recipe or jumbo oats. Using jumbo oats will impact the overall consistency slightly, by making the individual oat pieces larger.
- Ground cinnamon
- Salt
- Butter - unsalted butter, melted. You can use salted butter here, but will want to leave out the additional salt. If you want to get particularly fancy, you can also brown your butter, which will give the topping a bit of an extra nutty nuance.
How to Make Blackberry Apple Crisp
You can't find an easier dessert recipe than a classic homemade fruit crisp! This easy blackberry apple crisp can be thrown together in minutes, baked til golden and then slathered in ice cream to serve warm. Follow these steps:
- Start by peeling, coring and finely slicing your apples into a large mixing bowl. Add the blackberries to this along with the cornstarch, sugar, and lemon juice (image 1 below).
- Add the seeds from a vanilla pod, if using (image 2). Toss this together to coat the fruit.
- Pour the fruit mixture into your baking dish and spread as evenly as possible (image 3 below).
- In a separate mixing bowl, mix together all of the ingredients for the topping until you have a crumbly mixture. This recipe uses essentially a double batch of my standard Oat Crumble Topping.
- Sprinkle the oat topping generously over the fruit, ensuring this is well covered (image 4 below).
- Place in the centre of a preheated oven and bake until golden and the fruit is bubbling at the edges.
- Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a couple of minutes before serving with plenty of ice cream!
Top Tips
- There's a lot of apples in this recipe - depending on the size of your slices and the size of your blackberries, you might need to nudge these around and do a little manual placement in order to ensure that you get these spaced around the full dish for baking.
- I love oat crumble topping - it is always my favorite part of a crisp! If you aren't as much of a fan or want to reduce the sugar in this recipe, you can easily halve the crumble topping recipe. This might mean you don't get as generous a coverage over the fruit but it will still impart cozy flavour and texture!
- Fresh baked, the centre of this crisp can be quite liquidy depending on your apples and berries. The cornstarch will work to thicken this, particularly as it cools down. But, who waits to eat a cold crumble?!
Picking Apples and Blackberries for Crumble
The specific type of fruit used in this crisp will have an impact on the overall flavour of the recipe.
Ripeness and seasonality play a huge part in fresh crumbles. Different apples and blackberries will be more and less available in certain areas at certain points in the year. Personally I encourage using seasonal ingredients - nothing beats the harvest of seasonal fruit for comfort food like a crisp! This means that the qualities of the fruit will really shine through, making your crisp unique to your local area.
Using a Skillet versus a Casserole Dish
This is a super fun recipe to make as a skillet crumble!
Making the recipe in a skillet versus casserole dish is really an aesthetic option. The skillet is a fun way to serve a large dessert for a gathering, but it doesn't store as well for leftovers.
Opting for a casserole dish may be more convenient, but it is a little less cozy. The key benefit for the casserole dish is it stores better in the refrigerator and will let you more easily keep leftovers for a couple of days.
Size of Baking Dish
This recipe has been designed for an 8" or 9" dish. You can make it in other sizes, but there will be an impact on the baking times.
Some quick options:
- Split the recipe into a few smaller single serving baking dishes, like mini casserole dishes or these cute Le Creuset Mini Cocottes. These will bake a little more quickly, due to the smaller sizes, but will still need about 25-30 minutes for baking through the fruits.
- Make in a smaller single dish (6" or 7"). This will make for a thicker filling, which may take a little longer to cook through. But watch the topping doesn't catch and burn.
- Larger dishes (10"+). This will make for a thinner filling, which will cook quickly. You may find you need more oat crumble topping to get good coverage as well because the surface area is larger.
Storage Advice
The storage for this Blackberry and Apple Crumble depends quite a lot on what sort of dish you've made it in. Cast iron skillets do not like refrigeration - the moisture will mess with the skillet and will impact the flavour of your crisp. If you've baked this crisp in cast iron, you're best to move the leftovers into a separate dish or bowl and refrigerating covered. The topping will lose some of its crisp quality, but will still be delicious.
If you make this in a standard casserole dish, the whole dish can be refrigerated as is.
I would also be lying if I didn't say that I've eaten this, after leaving it sit out at room temperature. This isn't best practice from a food safety perspective and depends a lot on the conditions in your kitchen - mine runs pretty cold, so it's basically an extension of the refrigerator unless its a heat wave!
Substitutions and Variations
You can make this recipe your own with a few quick and easy alterations. Try:
- Adding chopped nuts - you can add chopped nuts to the crumble topping to give it some extra crunch and flavour. Chopped pecans work particularly well. Don't add more than about a quarter cup or you may need to add more butter to bring the topping together.
- Spices - this recipe only uses cinnamon (my favorite!), but you can tweak this and add extra spice combinations to suit tastes and preferences. Ginger and clove go quite nicely with blackberries.
- Change up the fruit - the beauty of fruit crumbles is that they're really easy to vary depending on seasons and availability. If you have more blackberries and few apples, you can simply change the ratio here - just avoid over-filling your baking dish! Different ratios, as especially different fruits (if you are using some raspberries or cherries, etc.), will impact the specific flavour, but they'll all be cozy and delicious in a homemade crumble!
FAQs
This is all down to personal preference and the type of pan you've used (as this will impact the storage of the dessert). In general leftovers of the crisp will last for about 3 or 4 days. It should be kept in the refrigerator for best results.
You can also reheat the crisp, though best practice would be to reheat only the portion you intend to consume. Reheating multiple times will dry out and risk burning the crisp, so if reheating leftovers, portion out first!
I don't recommend trying to freeze this dessert. Technically speaking, leftovers can be frozen in an appropriate container, but I've not had good results with defrosting and reheating.
A soggy crisp can be the result of a few things:
1. Too much butter in the topping. A common issue is adding too much butter to the crisp topping. This makes it extra greasy and can cause a soggy finish to the overall crumble.
2. Not enough oat crumble topping. If you've reduced the amount of oat crisp topping and aren't getting a good coverage on top of the fruit, the juices will bubble up and potentially overwhelm the topping, leaving it less crisp than desired.
3. Cooling and storage. If you've baked the crisp and allowed this to cool, your topping will lose some of the crisp crunch of a fresh baked version. This type of 'soggy' top isn't usually a problem though - and honestly up to personal preference, sometimes even more delicious than fresh!
Looking for more cozy desserts? Try:
Blackberry Apple Crisp
Ingredients
Ingredients for Filling
- 8 oz blackberries fresh or frozen, defrosted
- 4 medium sized apples
- 2 tablespoon granulated sugar or caster sugar
- 2 tablespoon cornstarch
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice or juice of one lemon
- 1 vanilla pod or 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
Ingredients for Crisp Topping
- 1 cup light brown sugar firmly packed
- 1 cup rolled oats
- ½ cup all purpose flour or plain flour
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ cup unsalted butter melted
Instructions
- Begin by preheating the oven to 350ºF (175C/155C Fan).
- Place the apple slices and blackberries in a large mixing bowl.8 oz blackberries, 4 medium sized apples
- Then add the sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice and vanilla bean seeds (if using) and give this a stir to coat the fruit.2 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 vanilla pod, 2 tablespoon granulated sugar
- Pour the fruit mixture into the base of a cast iron skillet or a casserole dish and arrange in a roughly even layer.
- In a separate mixing bowl, stir together the brown sugar, oats, flour, cinnamon and salt.1 cup light brown sugar, 1 cup rolled oats, ½ cup all purpose flour, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, ½ teaspoon salt
- Add the melted butter to the oat mixture and stir until you have a crumbly oat crisp mixture.½ cup unsalted butter
- Sprinkle this generously over the fruit mixture in your baking dish.
- Bake in the centre of the preheated oven for about 45 minutes until the top is golden and the fruit juices are bubbling at the edges.
- Remove from the oven and serve warm or room temperature with ice cream!
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