Apple Pie Pizza

If I ever go missing, some of the first people you need to check with are my friends here in Tucson. It's likely that they have me locked in a cellar somewhere with an unlimited supply of apples and are forcing me to make Apple Pie Pizzas for them every day.

It's true - the demand for apple pie pizza (or apple pie cheesecake) is so great among our friend group that I've never even been able to make our favorite dessert recipes for them. I personally don't even think of this as a dessert because it has fruit in it. Real desserts consist of chocolate.

Anyway, I have decided to share my secret recipe today. I think it's only fair that I pass it along before I move. And hopefully this will eliminate any plans of a hostage situation.

Apple Pie Pizza Ingredients

For our Best Ever Butter Crust:

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 stick (½ cup) butter or margarine

¼ tsp salt

¼ cup ice water

Apple Pie Filling:

¼ cup butter or margarine

4 medium sized apples (any kind!), cored, peeled, and sliced thin

¼ cup brown sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

Crumble topping:

¾ cup all purpose flour

1 cup oats

½ cup brown sugar

¼ cup butter or margarine, melted

¼ tsp cinnamon

Icing:

2 cups powdered sugar

3 tbsp milk

1 tbsp butter or margarine, melted

Opptional: Caramel syrup

Directions

Crust: Cut butter/margarine into small cubes, mix in bowl with flour and salt. Slowly add the water - I usually add it a tablespoon at a time and stir it into the mixture. Add more or less depending on how dry or sticky it's turning out. Wrap in cling-wrap and refrigerate for 4 hours. (If I need it done faster than that, I'll freeze for a half hour and it still works fine.) 

Apples: I like to use my apple corer to make the apples sliced thin and peeled. Melt butter in a large frying pan at medium heat, then add apples, sugar, and seasoning. Leave on stove for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Really let the apples soak in the sugar and seasoning.

Crumble: While apples are on the stove, mix together the dry ingredients and melt the butter, then mix together.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray pizza pan with non-stick spray. When the apples are about finished, roll out the crust and put on the pan. Place the apples on the crust evenly, then add the crumble evenly on top. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, or until crust is slightly browned.

Icing: After removing pizza from oven, mix together the powdered sugar, milk, and butter. Drizzle icing on top of the pizza. You can also drizzle caramel syrup with it on top.

It tastes best when eaten immediately while it's warm, but I've also refrigerated and saved for later and it still does great. 

I've also made this in bar form in a 9x9 pan and in a 9" pie tin for easier transportation. You don't necessarily have to use less ingredients when making it in different dishes, it may just be thicker, but none of my friends have ever had a problem with that!

Enjoy!

I made this into bars and brought with us on our Grand Canyon adventure!

Recent Recipes

Today, I wanted to share with you a few favorite new recipes from the past week. Here's what we've been eating!

Recipe Here! 

For Easter Sunday, we went with the traditional ham dinner. I hadn't ever made a ham before, so naturally I threw it in the crockpot all day just to see what happened. The honey mustard glaze was outstanding, and the ham was juicy and delicious! 

Recipe Here

I got beets in my Bountiful Basket this week, and decided to use them as a side for our Easter dinner. I also had never cooked with them before, but this turned out great and I would definitely use this recipe again! I actually made them in advance, and then refrigerated, and we decided we liked them cold better so we served them that way.

Oh and I must mention that our first ever canned pickles turned out delicious! I'm not sure which recipe we followed, but we followed it loosely and somehow they still tasted great. :)

This week, I was trying to think of other ways to prepare our leftover ham, and this idea just came to me. I made pretzel buns in our bread maker, then heated up ham, mozzarella cheese, and pineapple in a skillet and made it into small sandwiches. These turned out amazing! I just love our breadmaker. :)

Recipe Here

I made this cinnamon cake for breakfast on Friday morning, and I was crazy to think that it would last through the weekend. Nope, it was gone by mid-afternoon! It really did only take 5 minutes to throw together, however it seemed like way too little batter to fill a 9x13 pan, so I used a 9x9. 

Recipe Here

And for Curtis' birthday, I made a Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake. The Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake is kinda special to us - it was the first cheesecake I ever made for him, in April of 2009. :) This year, I used the above recipe, except after mixing the eggs, cream cheese, and sugar, I split it in half and made half vanilla, half chocolate. I poured the vanilla over the crust first, then swirled in the raspberry jam, and covered it with chocolate. I was really nervous about how it'd turn out, but it tastes great!

And you know what goes great with chocolate raspberry cheesecake? Strawberry Bellinis! I made strawberry sorbet by blending 2 cups of frozen strawberries, ¼ cup almond milk, 2 Tbsp of honey, and 1 Tbsp of sugar. I froze that for 24 hours, and then we enjoyed them last night. I used Cruse' Rose Sparkling Wine, after getting professional advice from a helpful worker at Total Wine. :)

Happy Sunday everyone!

Second Chances

I love to cook. I love creating new recipes. I love making old favorite recipes. I love being resourceful in the kitchen. If you like a good kitchen disaster story with a resourceful and delicious ending, then this story is for you. Enjoy. :)

Rewind to November: I made a Key Lime Pie. It was so creamy and delicious, and literally the first Key Lime Pie I've ever been able to eat without completely covering it in whipped cream. It was amazing...and simple! The ingredients were cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, and food coloring. I couldn't believe how perfect it was! I Pinned the recipe, thinking, "It has such a great base of ingredients, I can change it up all I want and make all sorts of pies just by using cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk!"

Fast forward to December: I made delicious peanut butter chocolate chip cookies for our trip back to Iowa. I made a TON. I put them in a container and added that to the large cooler of food we were bringing with us.

Jump into January: We got home, and I realized we had only eaten half of the cookies, and they were starting to get stale. Bummer! However, this was right after our truck broke down, so I didn't want to just throw things away. In my resourcefulness, I threw all the cookies into my Vitamix and blended until they were just crumbs. It made about 3 cups of peanut butter chocolate chip cookie crumbs - enough for 2 pies! I sealed them in a bag and stored for later.

Now come back to this week. On Tuesday, I decided that I wanted to make a pie. I didn't have a lot of pie ingredients on hand, but I had cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk! I mixed those together for the pie filling. I prepared half of the cookie crumbs for the crust (along with ¼ cup of butter and powdered sugar) and pressed the crust into my pie tin. Then, I melted ½ cup of chocolate chips and ½ cup of Reeses peanut butter chips together, and poured it on the crust. Finally, I poured the filling on top. Not the most elaborate or delicious thing I'd ever made, but I was sure that if it came out like the Key Lime Pie did, it'd be fantastic. I put it in the fridge and left it there overnight.

The next day, (Wednesday), Curtis wants pie for breakfast. So I go to serve some of the pie...and was crushed to find that apparently when you leave out the lime juice and food coloring, the pie filling didn't harden, and it was just a big soupy thickened sweetened condensed milk mess! Why!? How?!

After a brief moment of wondering "Do we eat this?" I decided to give the pie a makeover. A second chance. I poured the filling back into my mixer, and took the crust with peanut butter/chocolate topping and threw it in my Vitamix. After turning it back into crumbs, I added it to the filling, along with more cream cheese and some eggs. I then made another crust with the rest of my cookie crumbs, and this time put it in the cheesecake pan. I added my new filling, baked it, then let it cool.

The result? It. Was. AMAZING!! I made a one-of-a-kind Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake that I will never be able to recreate. Curtis can't keep his hands out of it.

I guess if you want the recipe, here's the best I can do:

Second Chance Cheesecake
-3 cups of 2 month old peanut butter chocolate chip cookie crumbs, separated.
-½ cup butter, separated
-½ cup powdered sugar, separated
-2 8oz packages of cream cheese, separated
-1 can sweetened condensed milk
-2 eggs
-½ cup chocolate chips
-½ cup peanut butter chips

Melt ¼ cup butter, mix with 1 ½ cups cookie crumbs and ¼ cup powdered sugar. Press on bottom of pie tin. Melt the chocolate chips and PB chips and pour on top of the crust. Put in freezer for 15 minutes. Mix 1 package of cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk together, pour over crust. Refrigerate overnight. 
Next day: Mix remaining cream cheese with the eggs, then add in yesterday's pie filling. Put yesterday's crust in a blender or food processor, then add in to the ingredients in the mixer. Prepare another crust just like yesterday's, only in a cheesecake tin. Pour cheesecake filling on top, bake at 300 for 1 hour, let cool before refrigerating. Enjoy!

...Or, you could probably also go on Pinterest and search "Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake" and find something similar tasting, but infinitely easier. ;)

Asian Pear Crisp

Asian Pears? Apple-pears? Pearapples? Whatever you want to call them, I personally am not a huge fan. We've gotten so many through Bountiful Baskets, probably because they're cheap fruits. We find them to be watery or flavorless, and would never just go buy them on our own. I don't always find a use for them, and sometimes they're just left sitting there until they go bad - no matter how flavorless they are, I hate it when that happens!

So what was my solution this week when we were given 10? Make Asian Pear Crisp! Super easy, and they can actually have flavor with some added ingredients, baked, and served with ice cream! Even though it's still quite warm down here, making crisps has been a fun way to bring some tastes of autumn to our table. 

My new Asian Pear Crisp recipe:

8-10 Asian Pears (mine were about the size of baseballs, pretty standard as far as I've seen with them)

⅔ cup sugar, divided

½ tsp salt

⅔ cup flour

⅔ cup rolled oats

⅓ cup brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1 stick melted butter

Preheat oven to 350

Peal, core and dice the Asian Pears, add ⅓ cup of the sugar and salt. Mix together, and put in greased baking dish.

Mix the remaining dry ingredients together, add the butter, then pour over the pears mixture. 

Bake for 35-40 minutes, serve warm with ice cream!

I made a large dish of it, hoping for it to last for a few days...but my husband enjoyed it a bit too much for that ;)

Strawberry Pie

Today I wanted to share a new favorite recipe with you - Strawberry pie! As I mentioned before, my friend Seneca and I did a little baking on Saturday, and this is what we came up with. I don't really think of strawberries as making a great pie on their own, but this was amazing!

I've talked about Bountiful Baskets before, an co-op that I participate in to get fresh fruits & veggies from. A few months ago, I purchased the strawberry add-on special that consisted of 8 pounds of strawberries for $12. I chopped them all up and froze them, because I knew I could get a good use out of them, even if I only used them in smoothies. Fast forward to this weekend, our friends requested we make some sort of fruity dessert, so I grabbed one of my bags of strawberries and we searched the internet looking for something to try. Usually when I'm making a baked good using fruits, I stick with a turnover or cobbler-type dessert, but we decided to be adventurous and try out a strawberry pie - and the results were amazing!

To start off, we used the easiest pie crust recipe we could find. We had no idea how much dough it would produce, but we had all the ingredients and so we went for it.

Pie crust:

1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

¼ tsp salt

½ cup butter, diced

¼ cup water

We whisked the first 3 ingredients together until it was a crumbly mixture, then added the water slowly while mixing. We played around with it a bit before rolling it into a ball, wrapping it with cling wrap, then putting it in the freezer for about 20 minutes.

Strawberry filling:

4-6 cups strawberries (it was difficult to tell how many because they were frozen!)

1 cup white sugar

⅓ cup all-purpose flour

While that was baking, we pulled the strawberries out of the freezer and put them in a skillet. It was maybe about 6 cups of strawberries - it seemed like a lot, but once they had defrosted and softened in the skillet it was closer to 4 cups. We added 1 cup of sugar to the skillet and stirred that in with the strawberries, then periodically as they continued to defrost. We left it on for about 20 minutes. After they were no longer frozen, we removed the strawberries to a mixing bowl and added the flour. The wonderful thing about using these frozen strawberries is that they left a LOT of sweet strawberry syrup behind - we put that in a jar and refrigerated it for later. 

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. We used a 9" cake pan (only because we didn't have a pie tin on hand!) we rolled out the dough and put it in, and we trimmed it down so that the edges went all the way up the side of the pan. We poured in the strawberry mixture and used the leftover dough to make a lattice on the top - we ended up having just enough dough to make it look pretty, and for it being our first time making a lattice, it turned out beautifully! We baked it at 425 for 35 minutes. 

After letting it cool, we served it with ice cream on the side, and some of the strawberry sauce poured on top. Everyone agreed that it was amazing, and there really isn't anything I would do differently!

Prickly Pear Lemonade

Today, we "leveled up" as "Arizonians". We are now on the level that involves eating a cactus fruit and making a lemonade out of it! Here's how it went:

It started when we got our Bountiful Basket on Saturday. Above is what the basket consisted of this week. As you can see, there are lots of lemons - and when your basket gives you lemons, you make lemonade! ;) 

Right in the front of the pile though, you will see the 4 roundish green things - those are prickly pear cactus fruits. We've seen them in the desert, either growing on the cacti or the remains on the ground after a javelina had feasted on them. Now, we had 4 prickly pear fruit - what were we supposed to do with them?!

At first we thought we had to wait until they turned red for them to be ripe, but learned that they come in both red and green. They are ripe when they are firm, if they become squishy or start to yellow then they are becoming overripe. They came with the thorns all removed, so we didn't have to worry about being attacked by our fruits. We learned about all the best uses for them, and decided to juice them and add them to our lemonade.

When they are ripe, the rind is very easy to remove - you just chop off either end and then make a slit down the side, and you can simply use your fingers to pull off the rind and it comes clean off! The fruit tastes sweet but has many hard seeds on the inside. After chopping it up, we threw it in my Vitamix and blended it into juice. 

The bowl on the left is the prickly pear, the right one is the lemon juice. We blended them both thoroughly and then Curtis did a great job straining the juices and getting rid of all those seeds. We then made lemonade without the prickly pear, and then when pouring glasses of lemonade we would add in the prickly pear juice.

Finished product! The cactus has a distinct taste that overpowered the lemonade. I liked it best when Curtis added a little rum… :)

Recipe for our Cactus Lemonade!

1.5 cups fresh Lemon juice

5 cups water

1 cup sugar

juice of 4 prickly pear fruits

Mix first 3 together and pour into glass (about ½ to ¾ of the way full) then fill the rest of the glass with some prickly pear juice.

If the prickly pear taste is too strong, rum helps, but only if you are of legal drinking age. 

Enjoy!

Being an Arizonian is fun! :)

Apple Pie Cheesecake

Apple Pie Cheesecake: My own original recipe, (probably my first completely original dessert!) made over Labor Day Weekend, and will probably be repeated many times in the future. :)

What it looked like by the time I got a picture…let's remember it's not the picture that makes it good, it's what's in it that makes it delicious! ;)

Ingredients:

For graham cracker crust layer:

4 cups of crushed graham crackers (give or take, I used 2 full sleeves of graham crackers)

½ cup or 1 stick of melted butter/margarine

½ cup of sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Cheesecake layer:

2 packages (16 ozs) of cream cheese, softened

½ cup of sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

Apple layer:

3-5 apples, (depending on size) cored, peeled, and cut thin

2 Tbsp of sugar

¼ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp cinnamon

Top layer:

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup flour

½ oats

¼ cup melted butter

Preheat oven to 350. Spray a 9x13" baking pan with nonstick spray. 

For the crust: I used a Vitamix to crush graham cracker crumbs and then mix in the sugar, cinnamon, and butter. You can also use a food processor or mix in a bowl. Press evenly onto the bottom of the baking pan.

For the cheesecake: Mix the cream cheese and sugar together until smooth. Add in vanilla, and then the eggs one at a time, once thoroughly combined, pour over the crust.

For the apples: Mix together with sugar and seasonings in a bowl, then evenly place them on top of the cheesecake, covering the top. I used 4 medium sized Gala apples.

For the top layer: mix all ingredients together and again cover the the top of the apples evenly.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or filling is set. Let the cheesecake cool off before keeping it in the refrigerator until ready to serve.

The top 2 layers have that warm, juicy, familiar apple pie taste, while the cheesecake complements it being like the ice cream you'd serve on the side. Enjoy! :)