Tag Archives: apple

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January 1, 2012

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desserts, Food & Drink

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Making apple crisp, a simple but delicious dessert

I used to make an apple crumb pie for Thanksgiving. It was good, but I don’t really like to mess around with real pie crusts so I always just bought a frozen crust. That was probably the downfall of my pie.

Then one magical day, I discovered the world of making apple crisp. Ok, so someone else actually made it and I was so enamored that I had to have the recipe. She obliged and now it’s one of my favorite fall and winter desserts to make. I’ve changed up the recipe a bit to add more spice of course.

Apple filling:

  • 5 – 6 Medium to large apples – I like to use sweet apples like Gala, Braeburn, Jonagold, Cameo, Fuji, etc.
  • 1/4 cup water
  • Cinnamon and ground ginger to taste

Topping:

  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1/3 cup butter, softened / melted
  • 3/4 cup flour
  • 1/2 cup oats
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • Cinnamon and ground ginger to taste

Directions:

Chop apples. Peel them if you like, but I like to leave the peels on. Place in a baking dish and toss with water, cinnamon and ginger.

Combine topping ingredients. Stir together by hand until combined. No mixer required.

 

Spread topping on top of apples. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until apples are soft. Hard apple cider in a Christmas glass is optional, but highly recommended for the cook.

It was so good I didn’t even get a picture of it before it was partially eaten.

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December 27, 2011

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baking, Food & Drink

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Caramel apple oatmeal cookies… a perpetual hit!

If you ever want to make cookies that are guaranteed to get raves, try these caramel apple oatmeal cookies. They take a bit of work to make but the result is delicious. The trickiest part is cooking them long enough. Either my oven isn’t hot enough or the time quoted on the recipe is way too short. To get them fully cooked, I ended up baking them for at least 16 – 18 minutes.

Assembling the ingredients:

Chop up the oatmeal in the food processor. I really like this step because I’m not a huge fan of oatmeal cookies, but if you chop it, the texture is much nicer.

Chop up the apples into little bits:

Mix the wet and dry ingredients:

After mixing in the apples and caramel bits, the dough is chilled for an hour or more and then formed into round balls and placed on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Extra caramel bits are added to the top of the dough for presentation.

After baking, they are ready to eat! This particular batch was actually under cooked. You need to make sure that the tops are a golden brown. Even under baked, they are quite delicious.

These cookies are quite soft and get softer by the day because of the moisture in the apples. I found it best to store them in the fridge.

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March 13, 2011

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Making a breakfast birthday cake

I got to do some more baking recently for a coworkers birthday. This baking was special because the celebration had to be at 9:30 am.  So instead of a dessert cake, I came across this Cinnamon Apple Cake recipe from Cooking Light that is perfect for breakfast! Also, I was amazed by the insane number of outstanding reviews it had, so I knew I just had to try it. An added bonus is the fact that the cake is relatively low in calories.

My husband bought the largest organic Fuji apples I have ever seen so I ended up chopping up just two of them and still had way more than the 3 cups called for. To make apple chopping easy, I used my peeler / slicer / corer contraption from Williams Sonoma, given to me a few years back by my mother-in-law. That thing rocks if you bake with apples often!

So many apples…

Dry ingredients combined:

(P.S. My apple corer contraption is the same red as my Kitchen Aid mixer, another awesome baking gift from my mother-in-law)

Mmmm… apples all cinnamon’d up and ready for use!

Folded into the dough – I noticed this recipe seemed to have more apples than dough, which of course makes it delicious. Also, I used extra apples. I spread some on top too because I had so many. And maybe I ate a few of the chunks.

The cake was baked in my 9” springform pan and that worked out just fine. I think next time I will bake it for a bit longer because I don’t think it was quite cooked all the way. I subtracted the 5 minutes for my larger pan as the recipe suggested but I think that was too many.

It earned rave reviews from my coworkers (and myself). Definitely worth making again.