Living in Mexico, the boys can pick mangoes, bananas and papayas from our garden but not apples. Since we’re in Toronto visiting family, we decided that we would take our boys on an apple picking adventure.
The weather was beautiful and we had a lot of fun. After an hour, we had ourselves 20lbs of apples.
The problem begins after this point. These are baking apples. The in-laws don’t bake. I have two weeks to use up these apples. What to do? What to do? Well, its the end of summer and beginning of fall. All the stores are displaying their canning supplies. There appears to be a huge comeback to putting up your own food. I wasn’t prepared to can all these apples but I stumbled upon this site that made little apple pies in mason jars that you can freeze. So, here is my interpretation of it since I wasn’t able to make pie crust in someone else’s home without all my kitchen toys.
Individual Apple Crumbles AKA Little Jars of Yumminess
(makes 9 half pint jars)
9 cups of apples peeled, cored and diced into 1/2″ pieces
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup corn starch
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups of water
Crumble Topping
1/2 cup butter softened
2/3 cup flour (I used all whole wheat)
2/3 cup rolled oats
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1. Toss apples and lemon juice together in a large bowl, set aside.
2. In a large pot, bring water, sugars, corn starch, cinnamon and salt to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil for a couple of minutes.
3. Add half the apples into the pot and cook for about 5 minutes stirring constantly. Add the remaining apples to the pot, stir to combine and cook for another 2 minutes.
4. Remove from heat and let cool for 30 minutes.
5. While the apples are cooling, make crumble topping. In a medium bowl and using a fork combine all the ingredients until it resembles coarse crumbs. You can’t really mess this up so don’t worry about what coarse crumbs look like. Just make sure you don’t have large chunks of butter.
6. Spoon apple filling into 1/2 pint (250ml) mason jars to just below the ridge of the jars
We need room for our crumble and also if you fill it with too much apples, well, it will boil over and make a mess. Tasty mess but a mess no less! I learned this from experience.
7. Cover the top apple filling with the crumble topping.
8. At this point, you can put the lids on the mason jars and refrigerate or freeze for later consumption.
9. To bake, preheat oven to 375F. Line a baking sheet with foil or parchment paper. Place your jars onto the baking tray and bake for 20 minutes if defrosted and 30-45 minutes if frozen.
10. Place a jar on a plate and top with whipped cream or, my personal favourite, vanilla ice-cream. Be warned, the pots are hot and the filling even hotter!
