Apple recipes, hits and misses

Its apple season now and I was able to come into a huge amount of free apples from my grandmother! Because of this, I have been trying out different apple recipes to use them up. What follows are some hits and a miss of my apple experiment.

First, for those Penzeys' fans, there is a recipe for apple bread in their current catalog that I gave a try. FAIL. I followed the recipe to the letter, and what came out was more of a cake than a bread. It was also really moist to the point of being TOO moist for my taste. I think its the large amount of oil the recipe calls for. Overall, I don't like this recipe and would caution others that try to make it.

However, I have had two great successes too!

First, I found a really great and simple apple crisp recipe on about.com
http://southernfood.about.com/od/applecrisps/r/bl11014d.htm

It came out great and the topping is divine. Really easy to make and tasty!


Second, I tried my hand at apple butter in the crock pot. This was also a great success and MUCH easier than the traditional method. See the recipe at
http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1612,156179-245203,00.html

The butter turned out really good. Some notes though: I only used 2.5 cups of sugar and it was still a bit sweet for my taste. I think next time I will reduce the sugar more or add more cloves. It still tastes really good though!