This Is Not A Cooking Page
But Those Apples
I haven't unpacked my recipe cards yet, so I have been looking up a lot of recipes online. Sometimes I will be looking for ideas like how to slow roast a deer shank or make a double extracted mushroom tincture. Sometimes I will be looking for a recipe that I know and love, but just don't want to look for. I always go to www.pioneerwoman.com for “perfect pie crust”. She’s got it right, so why shuffle around for that blue crinkled oil stained piece of paper. One tedious thing about recipe websites is all the build up before they finally get to the recipe. You know, “I woke up this morning to a crisp fall day and just had to go for a walk………” Five paragraphs later you find out what her favorite farmers market in Connecticut is and why she is making this particular recipe. I’ve gotten used to that and just scroll to the bottom. It is better than all the annoying pop ups. I leave those sights and find a less noisy page.
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I have been having fun cooking in my kitchen, mostly. I have had a few mishaps, but I will get into those in another post. I will attach it here eventually.
Today I want to share how much I appreciate getting connected with people that care about similar things and like to use and share the resources God provides. The other day my friend down the road texted me that she had free apples. I drove down with a couple cartons of eggs, visited two friends and came back with two giant bags of apples and a jar of pickled onions. Good trades. So, for the last week I have been plowing through mounds of apples making apple sauce, apple butter, apple crisp, dried apples, apple scrap vinegar, and apple chanterelle stuffing. Today the rest of the big bag was calling to me and saying, “don’t let me go to waste.”
I just love baking. My sister and I grew up watching in amazement as my mom made delicious treats including homemade doughnuts in a pressure cooker. My mom left baking and my dad in the early 80’s, but I still have her recipe cards, somewhere. I started thinking about a couple recipes my mom used to make; Raw Apple Cake and a chocolate one that I think was Brownie Apple Cake. They were both delicious and seemed to be unique to my mom. You know how everyone has similar standby recipes, I don’t know anyone else who rocked an apple cake like mom. I went online to see if I could find something similar (I know this is starting to sound like a tedious food blog, but this is not a cooking page. Don't bother scrolling to the bottom. There is no recipe). I searched for “raw apple cake” and found someone sure they had the best one. I also found an intriguing one that had apple brownies, but I am sure that is a misnomer. It would be a blondie now wouldn't it?
The raw apple cake sounded close, but I had to try the apple “not a brownie”. What I really had a hankering for was mom's brownie apple cake. So I made one batch the way the recipe was and another batch I added cinnamon hot chocolate mix.
while they were in the oven, I thought, “Oh, what the heck”, and went ahead and started the other recipe too. I decided to make them muffins instead of a cake and the next thing I knew, I completely abandoned the recipe and ended up with peanut butter apple muffins.
So, I have clearly lost my focus. The house smells great and I have more apples in the dehydrator and the oven is beeping. Time to see how these brownie things turned out. Yum, the original recipe “apple brownies” are scrumptious. A very fun texture and yummy apple treat, but nothing like mom’s cake. The one I added chocolate to seems a little more crumbly. I should have decreased the flour more. I took a bite (after it cooled a bit) and smiled. It did have that familiar chocolatey apple flavor of my mom’s illusive brownie cake. Something about the chocolate apple combo is so great. Mom’s cake also had this amazing texture. It was super moist inside, but the crust on top was airy and crispy. This new creation hinted at the crispy texture, but didn’t quite have it. Now the peanut butter apple muffins are ready and I have no idea what I am going to do with all this dessert. These peanut butter guys are pretty good. I changed them so much, it doesn’t count, but even so, I don’t think they would have been right.
I still have about 4 pounds of apples left and am contemplating whether to try hard cider, apple fritters or more applesauce. I said wasn’t going to give you a recipe at the end of this post, but I actually shared several good websites I have found useful and they have tons of recipes. Maybe I will see what I find on: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2014/10/100-apple-recipes.html. If you made it to the end of this post, then bless you and we must be pals.
Other good ones:
https://www.thekitchn.com/hank-shaw-drying-mushrooms-couldnt-be-easier-preserving-experts-share-their-favorites-193504
https://modern-forager.com/how-to-make-super-strong-tincture/
https://www.themeateater.com/recipes
Thanks for the walk down memory lane!!
Looks yummy!