Stoofperencrumble met lobbige room

As I still had some 'stoofperen' (cooking pears poached in red wine) leftover from yesterday, I decided to give them an upgrade with this crumble recipe.

I'll admit, I was sceptical right from the start. This recipe uses way more butter and sugar than my trusted go-to-recipe from Ottolenghi. I didn't add any water for that reason, as I figured the mixture would contain more than enough fat/liquid, and that turned out to be true - it didn't crumble nicely in my fingers, the dough actually immediately turned into large lumps which I then had to break up into smaller lumps to get anything resembling crumble. As soon as this mix hit the oven, the butter melted and the dough spread out, turning all my neatly separated crumbles into one big mass of dough. Not a crumble at all! And even worse, when I took them out of the oven again, they weren't even crunchy! Luckily, that changed again once they cooled down a bit, and they ended up being really crunchy, actually. Looking at how the dough behaved, I wouldn't be surprised at all if this recipe used the same ratio of butter, sugar and flour as a chocolate chip cookie recipe.

But alas, it was still a failure - it was way too salty!