Can I borrow some ice cream?

Todays recipe was a Salted Caramel Apple Crumble. Whenever my Nan from Perth flies over to visit she makes like 10 dishes of her apple crumple and it's simply amazing. We all gain 5kg kilos in the crumble itself, so this desert was a bit of a challenge.
I set off to Woolworths again, swiped Mums staff card and came home with everything I needed.
The recipe is based in a series of "you can make amazing recipes with canned fruit" which suited me fine because I didn't want to cut up almost 1kg of apples (my Nan does this in the lounge room whilst watching the bold and the beautiful - I'm not judging her but I don't think I've quite reached that level of senility yet!)
The recipe calls for:
1/2 cup pure cream. 1/2 cup brown sugar, 85g butter chopped, 1 tablespoon of sea salt 2x 770g cans of sliced apple and vanilla ice cream to serve.
For the crumble it requires: 1/3 cup of brown sugar, 1 3/4 cups of rolled oats, 50g of butter chopped, 1/2 cup shredded coconut and 3/4 cup of pecans chopped.
Learning from my previous cooking mistake, I checked what I already had in the cupboard and found we had a few of the basics - win!
So my ingredients looked like this so far:

After reading over the recipe a couple of times, it took me a little while to figure out that there were TWO lots of sugar going into two separate parts of the recipe, but once I sorted this out I was good to go.
The first step was to put the cream, sugar and butter into a saucepan over a high heat and to let it simmer for 2 minutes.

So I'm looking at my saucepan, two minutes have past...and it still looks like this ^

What the hell? Its on a high heat. Check. I've stirred it. Check. I re-read the recipe. Check. I type into Google to check that I've got the right definition of simmering in my head...yep I sure do. What is going on?!
I smell gas. Hmm...how peculiar.
I lift up the saucepan and apparently at some point or another the flame on the stove has gone out and I've been "simmering" my ingredients on gas.
Cooking 1. Harper 0.
With the dumb move behind me I reignite the stove and away we were, simmering in no time!

P.s I learnt this nifty trick. Don't you hate it when you're wooden spoon is covered in gunk and you don't want to put it down anywhere?

How good is that?

Anyway, moving on! The next step is to add the 2 770g of apples to the mixture. I feel that is a lot of apples but decide not to stray from the recipe. After stirring them around into the delicious looking caramel I pop them into my dish. 

Now that the apples are done. Its time to start working on le crumble. Pretty much all of my left over dry ingredients + the butter just get mixed in a large bowl - pretty simple stuff. However the measurements of butter are getting me. I don't have any scales so I'm pretty much winging it with these - something that I'm definitely not capable of just yet.

After mixing it all together by hand - definitely one of my favorite things to do, the mixture gets poured over the apples. At this point I can sort of tell that I should have used more butter because its SUPER crumbly and isn't gooey enough to hold all the dry ingredients together. But I freak out thinking the oven has been on for too long and just throw it in there hoping it'll all work out.

25 minutes later the top has got a lovely golden glow to it and my kitchen smells like delicious home cooking. It looked like this:

It does look a tad brown in the picture, but it was cooked perfectly all the way through. As expected however, I really needed to add more butter to get the crumble a little stickier on top - but it's all a learning process!
Until next time lovers,
bon apetit
harper.

What I learnt:
- Always check the stove
- When the recipe suggests what to serve it with, go with it. Ice cream would have really topped this dish off but I had to stinge out and go with cream, didn't I?
- Buy a set of scales and don't be afraid to use butter!