First of all, I apologise for the quality of my photos. Unlike Jack, I did not want to make this during daylight hours for the natural light. Please leave me and my obese cat alone.
Lest we forget, this is a pumble:
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Jack says:
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The published recipe is for pear pumble (this will become interesting later). Jack claims this is good for kids. I am not a mother, but I don't think so - when I was a kid I liked mixing things and decorating things, and the pumble involves neither of these skills, AND requires you to finely slice ingredients. Just make some brownies or cookies or something FFS.
I assembled my ingredients...
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...and got to work.
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We're off to a bad start. This is a very confusing direction. I took out an old loaf tin and hoped for the best.
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Thank yoi for your forensic attention to detail, Jack.
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I sliced my pears. It did not take long. In fact, it took me longer to read that paragraph, which is mostly Jack showing off about knowing something a bit sciencey, than it did to follow the step.
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My pears looked...large. I sliced them as directed, but I felt that small chunks would make more sense? This does not look like it will be particularly easy to serve and eat. But who am I to question a literal food expert?
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I am nothing if not forensic, so I used proper measuring spoons:
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There was no instruction to stir things round a bit, so I ended up with my top layer of pears looking like this:
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Despite my concerns about excessive cinnamon, I put the pears into the oven and continued.
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I am not a beach music festival, so I do not own any plastic shot glasses. I do have some cookie cutters though, including Cable favourites like horses, dinosaurs, and bunnies (RIP):
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Neither milk nor oil appear in the meticulous, forensic list of ingredients. I had oil but not milk so I did my best, not wanting flaccid, pale horses (no good for béchamel).
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And then I anxiously waited for it to come out of the oven.
Finally, it was time. My pears looked caramelised and delicious:
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...no wait, that's just the cinnamon.
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My pears had not softened all that much - they still had far more bite than you'd want from a crumble filling. But it was pumble time.
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Um.
How horrendously shit does that look?
Jack does not make any serving suggestions, but I accompanied my pumble with some homemade ice cream. This way I would be sure something on the plate tasted good. Plus, it's my ratafia (a Catalan licor) ice cream, and I figured alcohol might help the pumble-munching process.
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It was...not great. The pastry tasted like, well, pastry. Because it was not baked like a pie, the pastry had not absorbed any fruity flavour. The pear skin meant there was no way the pears would soften to a crumble filling texture. The top layer of pears was overspiced; the rest were bland. The size of the slices made it awkward to eat. It wouldn't make you hurl, but it's just a bad dish.
My boyfriend
said it was the best thing he'd ever eaten and sent photos to his friends' whatsapp group was perplexed. I told him it was a typical English dessert (sorry English Frauen) and he looked unimpressed. He politely ate his portion. Neither of us wanted seconds.
The ice cream? Superb.
Let's take another look at the original:
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As you can clearly see, Jack has put a rim of raw pastry on her pie dish and baked it like that - not mentioned in the recipe.
She also names this as BANOFFEE pumble. Not pear. I wonder if she ever actually made the pear pumble. No photos of it exist. There are major structural issues due to the sliced, not diced, pears. It's a really bad recipe.
So how does the SAME photo go from Banoffee Pumble on Jack's Insta to Pear Pumble on her blog a day later? That, my friends, is a mystery...could pears be cheaper to price? Easier to write up? Is she just a big old lying liar who lies?
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SHAN'T.