Last weekend Mr. Tricycle and I had an apple bake-off. I followed a recipe, and he made it up as he went along. As typically happens when Mr. Tricycle cooks, his invented version was superior to my results with a recipe.

Baked apples are the perfect fall treat – they’re even relatively healthy. I haven’t tried to feed these to toddlers yet, but I think they’re little kid friendly, especially if you tweak the filling to whatever floats their boat. Here’s the Mr. Tricycle version of a baked apple.

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Ingredients:

  • 4 Apples (try Fiji, Granny Smith, Cortland or Empire)
  • ½ Cup of Raisins
  • ½ Cup of Chopped Nuts (we like pecans or walnuts)
  • 1/3-1/2 Cup of Maple Syrup
  • ½ Teaspoon of Cinnamon

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Spread chopped nuts in a thin layer on a baking sheet and toast for 5 or 10 minutes, stirring once. They’re done when you can smell them and they’ve turned a light brown. If you’ve never toasted nuts before, it’s worth the extra time – the change in flavor is amazing.

3. Turn oven up to 425 degrees when you remove the nuts.

4. Remove apple cores. Many, many recipes tell you to leave the bottom of the apple intact, but we found it annoying to eat around this part (not to mention trying to scoop out the core without piercing the bottom layer of skin), so removing the whole thing is our preferred methods. We used a paring knife to cut the core out in a square (circular cuts are impossible). Cut from the top, flip the apple over, cut from the bottom, and then push the core out.

5. Place apples in baking dishes. Because you’re cutting the core all the way out, some of the filling will leak out of the apple during baking. To remedy this, we baked each apple in an individual oven-proof pottery bowl. If your apples are small enough, ceramic ramekins would work great. Baking them individually also allows you to customize the filling.

6. Make the filling. Combine raisins, toasted nuts, maple syrup and cinnamon in a bowl. I’ve tried using just brown sugar and butter as a filling, and while tasty, the texture combo isn’t the best. The crunchy nuts and chewy raisins are a really good contrast to the soft apple.

7. Stuff the apples. Using a spoon, cram the filling into the center of the apple. Feel free to pile it on top of the apple and let some fall into the bowl.

8. Cover and bake at 425 degrees. Most recipes tell you to add water to the bottom of the pan before baking, but since we cut all the way through the apples, we don’t want water mixing with the filling. We just covered the bowls tightly with foil, and threw them in the oven.

9. Check apples. You’ll want to check the apples after 20 or 25 minutes to test for doneness. We stick a fork in them and decide if they’re soft enough for us.

10. Top and eat. So yeah, I mentioned that baked apples are healthy. If you stop here, they’re pretty much guilt free. Though, not going to lie, I totally had one for lunch yesterday and topped it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream (at least it was low fat), and a drizzle of butterscotch sauce.

Do you make baked apples? What do you stuff yours with?