Brown Betty

So, I had some leftover bread to use, and also some cooking apples were lurking shyly in the bottom of the fridge, and somewhere from the deep recesses of my memory came a recollection that making a Brown Betty might be a good way of combining the two. I'd never actually tried making one before, so spent a little while googling recipes before settling on my own take on it. But really - apples, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, breadcrumbs - what's not to like? Even if I did have rather worrying memories of Michael Crawford playing Frank Spencer, alternating with Ram Jam's Black Betty, playing on my internal jukebox as I made it.

I took:
225g sliced wholemeal bread (all the recipes I saw said white bread, but I had only wholemeal) and made it into crumbs in my food processor.
90g butter
100g brown sugar
1.5 level teaspoons ground cinnamon (it was supposed to be 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 0.5 teaspoons mixed spice, but my hand slipped when adding the cinnamon...)
and mixed these all together over a gentle heat.
(next time I do this I will melt the butter in the saucepan first, stir in the sugar and cinnamon and then the breadcrumbs; it will be a lot easier to mix)
Next, the apples:
4 smallish Bramley apples - about 650g before peeling - I peeled, cored and sliced them thinly, and put half of them in an even layer at the bottom of a Pyrex casserole dish.
1 dessertspoon of sugar sprinkled over these (son #2 grumbles if things are not sweet enough)
Then, I sprinkled on about 40% of the breadcrumb mixture.
Next, the rest of the sliced apples, then another dessertspoon of sugar, then the rest of the breadcrumb mix.
I finished off by sprinkling 2 heaped teaspoons of white granulated sugar over the top of it, which contrasted nicely with the brown breadcrumb mix.
Baked at 170 degC for about 45 minutes - until the apples were soft and the breadcrumbs had crisped up on the top. (If you use white breadcrumbs, they go brown, apparently. If you use brown breadcrumbs, they just stay brown and perhaps go a bit browner. Hard to tell.)

Absolutely delicious, with or without custard, hot or cold. The whole family approved of it, and I have been granted permission to make it again.