These muffins are a wonderful fall treat. My mom was given this recipe years ago when she spent the day with her cousin Kathy. They made a few muffin recipes and other fun fall treats. This is probably my favorite. Not only do these freeze well, they are also good for a few days after baking and toast nicely.
You can use all purpose flour, but these are also great as a 50/50 mix with AP flour and 50% white whole wheat. We rarely use the full amount of sugar. They are good with or without the steusel. If you chose not to add the streusel, they are even less sweet, which is a nice change sometimes.
If you prefer to make a loaf of bread, pour into a greased and lightly floured pan and bake for about an hour.
We do not follow this recipe precisely. Depending on who is making the crisp, and how many apples we have, we often fill our pan 3/4 of the way full because we really like apples. Instead of cutting in cold butter, ours is usually softened and we just mix it with the topping ingredients. Since we do not like super sweet apple crisp, we use one cup sugar in the topping, but use more if making for company. If the topping seems a little dry, we add extra butter to the top when we put the apple crisp in the oven.
While this is great for dessert with vanilla ice cream, we often eat it for dinner. We also enjoy it warm for breakfast with milk.
Allan has always enjoyed custard and often used a mix to make it. However, with a little more work, we now make home made custard for desserts. This is not the pourable dessert custard (also called “creme anglaise”), but very similar to vanilla pudding. Only much better.
In the early summer, the kids often pick red blackberries. We enjoy them and occasionally have enough for a mixed berry jam. Oma told us the other day of a blackberry farm that had you pick berries for a very good price. We enjoyed picking around 30 pounds of blackberries and ate a pound or two also. They were very good.
Not wanting the berries to go to waste, we froze some, made fruit leather with some and Adrian made a pie. We used most of the berries for jam. It is wonderful on fresh sourdough bread! There are a lot of seeds in blackberries. If desired, strain part or all of the seeds.
This is a small batch jam recipe that uses very little sugar. For a sweeter jam, see notes.
Another recipe from Aunt Bonnie’s recipe box. We baked ours in a pie pan which worked very well also. The card did not included time to bake, but we just let our set up like a cookie.
One thing I really like about many of the recipes from Aunt Bonnie is the recipe makes a small amount. There was enough here for us, but no left overs. I am not sure when she copied this recipe, but when I looked it up, it looks like it was popular in the early 1960’s.
I am not sure where I originally found this recipe. I know that we made it a few times in our travels for potlucks so I have had it for all -most?- of the time I have been married. I never tell what the secret ingredient is until people have tried this recipe and say they like it. Most think it is coconut, so why ruin it for them?
The recipe says it makes 2 pies, but we usually bake it in a 9×13 casserole dish and cut it into squares. For a gluten free crust, see notes.
This is a good bread to have with chili or soup when you do not want plain cornbread. You can use yellow corn meal if you want, but we prefer to use white. It tastes great toasted and is a good base for BLT’s and other favorite sandwiches.
Carol Ragsdale gave me this favorite muffin recipe in South Africa around 23 years ago. It is a great, basic recipe that can be changed in so many ways. Leave plain, add chocolate chips or blueberries, or reduce the milk slightly and make banana muffins. Experiment and see how many combinations you can come up with, but to get you started, check out the options at the end of the recipe.
