Apples Galore

We have a couple of weeks a year where we have a complete abundance of apples in our garden –  so many apples we don’t know what to do with them! Mr M is convinced that one of the apple trees on one side of the garden is eating apples and the tree on the other side is cooking apples but to be honest they pretty much taste the same to me raw – too sour. So we tend to treat them as cooking apples and cook with them as much as we can. It’s not quite the dream of owning an apple tree that I had in mind. I imagined children wandering and picking an apple as a tasty snack (they are likely to get a mouthful of worm if they do this with our trees!) Instead, there are a fair few rotten apples that need to be collected on a daily basis and apples that need to be cooked and baked as quick as you can before the next deluge. So a couple of weekends ago we had an ‘apple baking Sunday.’

I think it’s going to become a tradition that we have an apple baking weekend where we go crazy and bake as much apple related stuff as we can and freeze some of the of the goodies for the future.  However – despite spending all day in the kitchen – things didn’t last as long in the freezer as we had hoped!

We made an Apple pie, an Apple and Blackberry crumble, Apple Cake (see here our Apple and Cinnamon Cake recipe here- we just made them as muffins in cake cases as opposed to a big cake as in this recipe) and some yummy Apple and Blackberry Yoghurt Lollies. These are super easy to make – literally mix yoghurt with stewed apples and blackberries and freeze for six hours. We used Strawberry Yogurt, just to give a bit of sweetness as our apples are sour!

Next time – maybe we need to double quantities to make everything last a little longer. But it felt Autumnal and seasonal to have an apple baking day. Next to tackle lots of Rhubarb we have growing!