If You Have Leftover Cornbread And Fruit, You Have The Start Of A Classic American Dessert

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Cornbread is an American classic in and of itself, an age-old tradition of the South used to accompany everything from soul food meals to piping hot bowls of Texas chili. And while our various cornbread recipes show that you can add sweet ingredients to cornbread, one of the many ways you can use leftover cornbread is to flip the script by adding it to a classic American sweet treat by making it the topping for your next fruit crumble.

Cornbread's coarse crumb will crisp up beautifully and provide a crunchy and delightful textural contrast to the gooey and tender baked fruit in a crumble. Cornbread is also a perfect balance of savory and sweet, which will balance an ultra-sweet fruit filling like peaches as well as a tart filling like blueberries or apples. The earthiness of corn will also work well with common crumble baking spices like cinnamon and caramelly sweeteners like brown sugar. Plus, while most crumbles have you make the topping from scratch, with a mixture of oats, flour, sugar, and spices, leftover cornbread is a ready-made topping that you simply blend with sugar, cinnamon, and butter. And since cornbread is prone to drying out, especially after a few days, the gooey, bubbly fruit filling will impart plenty of moisture. If you don't have enough cornbread to cover the top of your crumble, you can always supplement with crushed oats and chopped nuts. Don't forget to mix in a few cubes of butter to make the mixture worthy of its name.

A cornbread topping instead of the standard crumble topping of flour, sugar, and butter will work with nearly any fruit crumble recipe you have in mind. A classic cornbread topping with brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter would pair well with a blueberry or blackberry crumble. A word to the wise with berry crumbles: Use frozen as opposed to fresh berries so that the filling won't be too watery. You could also substitute cornbread for half of the gingersnap cookies in a recipe for ginger pear crumble. Cornbread tastes delicious with ginger, so you could supplement with powdered ginger or even finely diced crystallized ginger. If you really wanted to think outside of the box, you could use a cheesy cornbread topping for an apple crumble. After all, a slice of cheddar cheese over apple pie is also a classic American tradition. If you don't have leftover cornbread on hand, you can still make a shortcut cornbread crumble with the help of cornbread mix that you can combine with butter, sugar, and oats with no pre-baking necessary.

You can serve your cornbread crumble with a side of corn ice cream that you can likewise make an icy, milky dessert at home with the help of sweet corn. For that matter, if you have even more leftover cornbread, you can make cornbread ice cream sandwiches. You could top them with fruit pie filling from a can for a kind of reverse take on the cornbread crumble idea.