Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

KITK: Apple-raspberry Crisp

So I managed to get my little guy to help me out with another baking project. This one is an old family favourite but I continue to get better at it and keep mixing things up to keep it interesting. The base of this classic Apple Crisp recipe can be changed to include whatever fruit you would like – from apples to peaches and pears and even berrries added in there too!

This time around, we added lots of delicious raspberries to the apples on the bottom. Avery did a great job of arranging all the fruit on the bottom of the dish so that each serving would get a little bit of both fruits.

Here is the recipe, passed down to me by my uber-baker grandmother, now in her nineties! I can’t promise anything about low-fat or give you the calorie count or anything, but I can promise you that when made right, it is delicious!

Dee-Dee’s Apple Crisp:

Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup butter / marg.
- 1/2 to 1 cup brown sugar (how sweet do you like it?)
- 3/4 cup w. flour (add 1 tsp cinnamon)

Directions:
- Cover bottom of a 10″ pan with slice apples (you can add 1/4 cup of apple juice over apples)
- Cream butter, add sugar
- Gradually, mix in flour and rub to a crumbly mix
- you can add 1/2 cup rolled oat if you wish
- Spread crumbs over top of fruit
- Bake at 325 – when brown on top & apples are soft, take out of oven (maybe 25 mins or 30 mins, depends on oven)

I usually do add the rolled oats because it makes a better “cover”. If you have too little on top, the apples and fruit underneath don’t get all sealed in. Also using real butter will of course help the taste as well as the texture. For this size pan, use at least a few apples (more if they are small and less if you are adding other larger fruits).

Our combination of apples and raspberries turned out amazing!! The whole thing is already all eaten up (or I assume so anyways since I sent both kids with a little serving of it for dessert in their lunch bags today!). I will definitely bake it again (if you do too, I’d love to hear about it!). Next time I’d actually like to try peaches and raspberries! Hopefully I can convince a helper or two to work on that project with me.

Happy baking!

KITK: Berry Muffins for Teachers

I think my kids are getting tired of our baking adventures – it takes a little more persistence to coax them into the kitchen to help me out these days. I am still very much on a baking kick though. It’s one of the few things I can manage to do these days that helps the family, gets out some of my creative inclinations, and gives us a tangible result to enjoy.

During the last week of school, I had Avery help me bake some muffins to say “thank you” to his daycare teachers. We used a recipe I’d previously tried out once before – the “Best Ever Muffin Mix”, and added our own fruit to it as well. We did one batch of blueberry muffins and one batch of mixed berry.

With any base mix (whether from scratch or store-bought), adding fruit is a great way to jazz things up. It’s quick and easy and adds greatly to the flavour and variety of the muffins. I always find using frozen fruit is best because it holds itself very well together during the mixing and baking process. If you are using fresh fruit, try to add it very last and only after your batter has been fully mixed in. Gently fold in your fruit until it’s just barely mixed in (and spread out the way you’d like) so that it doesn’t get all mushy and disapear into the mixture (unless that’s what you’re aiming for!).

Mixed Berry

Blueberry

We made 2 batches since the recipe only makes a dozen and we only have 1 muffin pan anyways! This worked out anyways because it helped clue me in to the idea of making the 2 different kinds. And it ended up working out really well for the daycare because they were supposed to have been doing their “baking day” on the very day we brought them in but the staff member who was organizing it was sick that day! So the kids got to share some of the muffins for their “baking day” snack (cut into quarters) and there was still enough left over for the teachers to enjoy.

It was a very busy week, that last week of school, but I’m glad we got all our teacher cards and teacher gifts handed out (the apple notepads came late but were just in time to still put together and wrap up to bring to school!)! Avery’s teacher sent back a very nice thank you card to say she really appreciated the scrapbook as a place to keep her memories of teaching… she is a young teacher so I’m sure that scrapbook will get very full over the years!

Hope everyone is enjoying a nice summer vacation with their kids or at least the nice summer weather if your own routine hasn’t changed very much!

KITK: Banana Bread, Banana Cake, and a new Banana Icing recipe

For this “Kids in the Kitchen” baking adventure, I made the actual cake and the kids helped with the icing when they got home from school…

Avery ices our banana cake!

I have actually been baking the exact same Banana Bread since 1998! I was given the recipe at a parenting program way back when I was pregnant with Harmony. It’s a really super easy banana bread to make, and over the years I’ve added other ingredients to mix it up a little and experiment with new tastes. It tastes so fabulous with blueberries, strawberries or chocolate chips! It’s a very “kid friendly recipe” and kids of any age can help with different parts, like mushing up the bananas (they can’t really mess that up other than being a bit messy!), mixing it all up, or tossing in some of the extra ingredients.

Even though we’ve relied on this “stand by” recipe for over a decade, I was still tempted to try out this new recipe for Banana Cake that I found on a new Live Journal Community, “Amanda Bakes”. I loved that it was more of a cake than a bread, because I’d tried to turn my banana bread into cakes over the years with limited success (even with chocolate chips and chocolate icing, it was not quite cakey enough).

So this week, I tried out the Banana Cake and it was delicious! I think the cinnamon really helps add to the cakey flavour.

New banana cake recipe - mmm, cinnamon.

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