not far from the tree

Carole Ferrari, owner of The Bus, has been kind enough to pass along her recipe for the Apple Squares she made at the year end party.

I used the recipe this weekend. My apologizes, my squares don’t look as professional as Carole’s but regardless the recipe is delicious!

This truly is a tasty treat!!

Enjoy!

Apple Square Recipe:

To make 24 large squares.

There are four layers to the apple squares: crumble, apple sauce, sliced apples, and more crumble. Not Far From The Tree’s apple sauce is absolutely delicious. This apple sauce recipe is a little different, but also quite delicious!

Crumble:

2 cups rolled oats

2 cups flour, spelt, whole wheat or all-purpose, whichever you prefer

2 cups sugar

1 cup of melted butter, or oil

Apple Sauce:

15 or so red or pink skinned apples, a variety of species is nice, washed and roughly chopped small, skin on

2 tspns cinnamon

an inch of ginger, microplaned or minced

1/2 cup of honey

1/3 cup of water

Sliced Apple:

6 apples, pink or red skinned, finely sliced. A mandoline is helpful

The juice of half a lemon

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees

To Make the crumble:

In a bowl, mix all the crumble ingredients together thoroughly, rubbing the mixture through with your hands. Set aside.

To Make the apple sauce:

Put all of the ingredients for the apple sauce in a pot and cook on high heat for about 5 minutes, stiring every few minutes or so. Then lower the temperature and continue to cook until the apples are cooked through, about another 15 minutes. Cook the apples until the skin is soft and the colour of the skin has stained the apple sauce pink. Don’t cook the applesauce too much more at this point as it is going to be cooked again in the oven as part of the square.

If you haven’t sliced the apples yet do it now while the apple sauce is cooking.

To Assemble:

Sprinkle about an inch-worth of crumble over the bottom of a 12×18 inch pan. Press down on the crumble with your hand to level and firm up the crumble.

Spread an inch-worth of apple sauce on top of the crumble. Be careful not to lift the crumble as you spread the apple sauce. To avoid doing this use the edge of a spoon to gently spread the apple sauce around until it is evenly distributed.

Lay the apple slices on top of the apple sauce over lapping them as you cover the pan. Sprinkle lemon juice on the apple slices.

Spread more crumble over top of the apple slices, but only half as much as on the bottom. Press this down gently with your hand. Bake for 30-45 minutes, until the top of the crumble is gold.