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!

Canada Day and Patriotic Blinkies

I hope everyone had a great weekend, and I heard somewhere it was it a long weekend for some people? I guess maybe in the States since the 4th of July fell on a Sunday this year. It’s always been kind of nice to kick off the first week of summer holidays with these patriotic celebrations that fall so conveniently soon after the end of the school year.

We enjoyed our Canada Day celebrations, but although we are lucky to live in Canada’s capital (where there are always a ton of things to do, especially downtown in and around Parliament Hill), we just stayed local for the events we attended. My son loved visiting a park that had all sorts of games and “bouncy” air-inflated rides set up. He went on a small one with an obstacle course and slide, then on a very tall slide, then got his face-painted and tried some of the games. My daughter was very aloof about the experience (as preteens can often be), but when she saw her friends there, she was running over to say “hi” to people.

We finished off our holiday day with a yummy BBQ at home, complete with some freshly-baked Canada Day cupcakes that I’d made that day. I’d tried to do a layering effect, but the recipe I was using was a little on the small side and I didn’t have quite enough batter. I think they still came out great though, and the icing (also red – or at least as red as I could make it without dumping in a full bottle of red food colouring, which my hubby and likely also my son are sensitive to) added a lot to the top “layer” to get the red-white-red look that I was going for (like our flag).

Also on Canada Day, I worked on creating some blinkies for both our celebration and started some for the US holiday a few days after on the 4th of July. I finished those ones off yesterday (the 4th), so it’s not likely they’ll get much use this year, but hopefully in years to come they’ll be handy for anyone wanting to show a little patriotic love in their message board posts, siggies, blogs, etc.

Summer Patriotic Big Blinkies

Our family had a very busy first week and weekend of summer holidays so I’m looking foward to a slower pace for this week! My daughter is taking a trip with her grand-parents to southern Ontario, and my son has settled in nicely into his daycare center’s summer program (full-time instead of part-time!) so I’m really eager to get caught up on all the work around the house (both in slowly plodding through some housework interspersed with lots of resting as well as some much-needed paperwork and overdue phone calls), work on my websites, and work on my health (like more regular and less cut-short-noisy-interupted naps)!!!

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!