Visiting an orchard to go apple picking is a wonderful way to make a memory, celebrate the season and support local farms — but what do you do with all those apples?
While apples are a fiber-rich, vitamin-packed snack on their own, there are a lot of ways you can put your apples to use. Try making a pie, a cake or even a craft as you make your way through your seasonal surplus. Here’s what we did with our apples.
*Note: You’ll see lemon juice mentioned often with these ideas. This is because lemon juice prevents fresh-cut apples from browning.
Baked Apples with Oatmeal Filling
Grab an apple per person for this recipe and core each apple. This should leave a hole in the middle. Place the apples on a cookie sheet. Next, mix oats, brown sugar and a sprinkle of cinnamon together with melted butter. Use a spoon to stuff this mixture into the apple holes. Bake these at 350ºF for half an hour.
Steamy Apple Cake
To make this grand cake, you’ll need five apples, two cups of flour, a pinch of salt, four teaspoons of baking powder, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one teaspoon of vanilla extract, four eggs, one cup of brown sugar, one cup of white sugar and one cup of vegetable oil.
Peel and core your apples before slicing them into ¼-inch or smaller cubes. Set aside your cinnamon and mix the rest of the above ingredients to form your batter. Pour it into a lightly greased 9-by-13 -inch cake pan. Sprinkle the cinnamon on top (to your taste) and bake the dish for 50 minutes at 350ºF.
Personal Pies
Create cute kid-friendly apple pies to grab for dessert or pack in a lunch with nothing more than your apples, brown sugar, white sugar, flour, an egg, lemon juice, pie crust and a muffin tin.
We used a regular drinking cup to cut circles in our store-bought pie crust, which we then put in our muffin tin and filled with our other ingredients. Keep the top simple with a lattice pattern — no hole-poking required.
We used four apples, ¼ cup of white sugar, ¼ cup of brown sugar, an egg, a teaspoon of cinnamon and two tablespoons of flour for our filling.
Once your pies are assembled, bake at 425ºF for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.
Dried Apple Garland
Create a warm fall garland with dried apple slices, twine and an upholstery needle. First, cut your apples into thin, round slices. Soak your slices with lemon juice, pat them dry and then bake them for 10 to 12 hours at 150ºF, flipping them periodically. You can also use
a dehydrator.
After the apples are dried and cooled, you can thread them on your twine using the upholstery needle. To add variety to your garland, consider beads, pinecones or other dried fruits.
Apple Cinnamon Water
If you have tart, flavorful apples, consider using them to sip your way into the fall spirit with a seasonal beverage. For this, you’ll need a pitcher, at least two apples, lemon juice and a few sticks of cinnamon.
You’ll want one apple and two cinnamon sticks per four cups of water. First, slice up your apples; then, spritz them with lemon juice. Add the fresh-cut apples to your water and stir with the cinnamon sticks. Cover the concoction and let it brew in the fridge for a few hours
before serving.
