Apple Pies, Less Fussy Friend, the Baked Apple
Hey, you’re at CrispyBake’s Kitchen, where I’m teaching you how to make delicious homemade dishes to share with your family and friends. Today, we’re doing apple pies, less fussy friend, the baked apple. I’m excited to show you my favorite baked apples recipe. It is a delicious and relatively healthy treat that you can make at the end of the day. It could be a single serving or feed the whole family, and it is so easy with no prep. Let’s get started.
Ingredients
- 4-6 apples (washed)
- about a third of a cup of pecans
- one third of a cup of packed brown sugar
- fresh nutmeg
- half a teaspoon of cinnamon (ground)
- 1 tablespoon vanilla
- a pat of butter
- a cup and a quarter or a cup and a half of water, apple juice, or apple cider
Preparation Steps
1. Preparing Pecans
Starting off with about a third of a cup of pecans, which I’m giving a rough chop to. If you don’t like pecans, you’re a monster, and I’m kidding, if you don’t like pecans, you can use walnuts, macadamia nuts, anything you’d like, even no nuts at all. All right, those are roughly chopped. To my satisfaction, I’m gonna set these aside for a moment.
2. Adding Brown Sugar and Spices
So my mother-in-law is actually coming over, and I wanna make a special treat for her, because baked apples are her favorite. I’m gonna make up the best batch possible. I hope she likes it. One third of a cup of packed brown sugar in there. Gonna add in some fresh nutmeg. Nutmeg is amazing, and in my humble opinion, if you’re doing nutmeg in anything, like a white sauce, a dessert, what have you, get the actual nut in a microplane. This comes in so handy, you can use it for hard cheeses, you can use it for zesting, and you can use it for nutmeg. Great little nutmeg in there. It’s so fragrant, and the freshly grated nutmeg is a million times better than the powdered one you can buy. Just a word to the wise. Takes me away. It’s really nice. My mom claimed she hated nutmeg. She must have had some horrible experience in her childhood, but once I’ve introduced her to it, my way, she actually likes it, so I don’t know what she was talking about. But I’m only mentioning this to tell you that I didn’t have any nutmeg as a child, because my mom said it was gross. Okay, now we’re gonna add in half a teaspoon of cinnamon. Ground is totally fine in this case. Just give it a quick little semi-mix.
3. Mixing Nuts into Sugar-Spice Blend
Now we’re gonna add in my third of a cup [of pecans]. You can add more nuts if you want. It’s really just a matter of how much are you scooping out that apple, and how much can it hold in the well. You can add other things, like you could be all spice in here. You could have lemon zest. You could pour straight bourbon in here. Whatever you want is all gonna be good. There’s not really a wrong thing to do, like no to anchovies, that’s about it.
4. Hollowing Out the Apples
And now we’re going to scoop out our washed apples. I tried using a little knife, but it seemed a bit dodgy. So anyhow, what works really well is just a teaspoon or a tablespoon. Look at that. It’s like a melon baller, but for apple. Okay, so you want to create a well for your apple for all that delicious filling, but you don’t wanna go through to the bottom. Leave like half an inch or so so that the filling will sit in there and it won’t leak out. So scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop. And of course you wanna remove the seeds, remove the core, but you’re also removing a little bit of the flesh to make way. This is like some horror movie sound effect. Like there was a ghost in your creepy rental house. The one that’s from colonial times and countless people have lived and died there. And then maybe there’s a cemetery somewhere hanging around. I don’t know, just randomly mentioning things. No relation to where I am right now. Okay, so we can feel through the bottom that this half an inch, but I kind of wanna create just a little bit more space and really remove any trace of the cores. Now I have my hollowed-out apple. Apple-y. These can go hang out in my baking dish. One apple and we’ll repeat the process. Use that rounded teaspoon and just press, press, press. The apple skin will yield really quickly. And then just melon ball that out. Don’t worry if you get little cracks around here. Now one’s gonna notice. It’s gonna be brimming with filling and also most likely you’ll be eating this with ice cream or whipped cream or some kind of creamy delicious thing that’ll cover up the top.
5. Filling the Apples
And now we’re going to fill our apples up with this brown sugar pecan business. And because I have some extra pecans and I really scooped a lot of the apple out and just gonna toss them in. There’s no rules except for what I say. All right, so let’s mix that in here. There we go. Finish popping that in there. It’s totally fine if some of the filling leaks out because you’re gonna have like a nice juicy apple situation on the bottom anyways.
6. Adding Vanilla Splash
So now we’re gonna do like a little splash of vanilla. The recipe says it’s a tablespoon so you could like divide a tablespoon or just give it a splash. So good.
7. Topping with Butter
The very last bit for the apples is just a little bit of butter. So is this optional? Of course it is. You don’t have to put butter on your apples if you don’t want to. But living that caloric life. Okay, so just a pat of butter on top and some of this will ooze down in here.
8. Preparing the Water Bath
This is not ready to go into the oven now because if you did that, your apples would like burn on the bottom, get dry on top and it would not be like juicy and delicious. The solution is kind of like baking them in a water bath. And you’re gonna add in maybe like a cup and a quarter or a cup and a half of water. You could also use apple juice, apple cider. The world is kind of your oyster on this. But really it’s just gonna create a bit of steam in here and let the apple not dry out because that is the enemy. You want a juicy, delicious melt in your mouth apple.
9. Baking the Apples
We’re gonna pop those into the oven at 350F for about 50 minutes. You want the apples to be nice and softened but not falling apart.
10. Basting During Baking
When your apples are done baking or even halfway through baking, you can take them out and just baste them with the juices a little bit, fill those cavities up and it’ll all just soak in and keep them really nice and juicy.
11. Cooling and Serving
After they’re done baking, you can tent them with a little bit of foil or any kind of covering and let them sit just cool down. They’ll continue baking a little bit too to finish softening up. And then once they’re warm and not scalding, piping hot, they’re ready to enjoy. These guys need to get basted just a little bit more. I hope Suzanne likes this. This is so fun to make and really simple. Like it was just like it-bap-boop, all done and the house smells like magic. So she’ll walk in and have a nice eye-baked for her moment and then she’ll get to enjoy so the end of the day after helping out with Lachlan and Joerich.
Conclusion
I think baked apples are the perfect accompaniment for easy three ingredient no machine ice cream, so if you don’t wanna eat too much ice cream in one sitting, this is a great accompaniment to it. This is gonna be so good. One of my favorite things to do is everything with apple and spices in the fall. For me, the fall is all about apple this, pumpkin that, spice everything. So if you wanna check out my apple pie recipe, click up over here. It is so good. I’ve really practiced my apple pies for a long time to get it right for you. And I have all my tips and tricks for like the best pie crust, everything. Pie crust is so easy to make once you get the hang of it. And you can do it with a food processor. You can do it with a cheese crater because I didn’t have a food processor forever. Cheese craters work really well.
This is like beyond easy. So it’s like an apple pie, like ultra easy addition. I love that it’s chock full of nuts on the inside because it gives you all that crunch like a pastry would, but in a much more healthy way. Hmm, I’ll enjoy the rest of this with a big splash of cream and maybe some more ice cream on top because that’s the life I live.
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