Individual Apple Crisps

For our March recipe, we’ve picked one of our popular fruit side dishes: apple crisp. Rather than serve out of a large dish, we make ours in individual portions of appley goodness topped with a fabulous crumbly topping. One entree we like to serve with our apple crisps is Dave’s vegetable and ham quiche (with homemade sausage balls on the side as well).

Our recipe is a version of the original recipe of Patrick and Gina Neely on Food Network, so we thought we’d also share a cute video we found of the Neelys making their apple crisps on “Down Home with the Neelys”:

Individual Apple Crisps

from the Inn on Mill Creek Bed & Breakfast
Prep time: 30 minutes / Bake time: 40 minutes plus 5 minutes cooling / Makes 8

Filling
7 medium granny smith apples
3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
3/4 Cup brown sugar
3 Tbsp maple syrup
1 Tbsp lemon juice

Crumbly Topping
3/4 Cup all-purpose flour
1/2 Cup brown sugar
3/4 tsp cinnamon
6 Tbsp chilled butter, cut into small cubes

Preheat oven to 350.

1. Peel, core and chop the granny smith apples. We use one of these to peel and core, which really cuts down on the prep time:
   
2. In a bowl containing the remainder of the ingredients, stir in the apples until a nice glaze appears on the apples. We use a wooden spoon for this. You do not want any dry flour or brown sugar showing on the apples.
3. Spray ramekins with non-stick spray and spoon apple filling into each ramekin. We overfill because the filling tends to shrink when cooling after baking.

1. Mix flour, brown sugar and cinnamon in a large bowl.
2. Mix in the chilled butter (you can use a pastry cutter/mixer, but we’ve found using your hands works better), until the mixture has clumps the size of small peas. Overmixing will result in less crumbly topping.

Sprinkle the crumbly topping over the filling and bake the ramekins on a cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Take out and cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Innkeeper Tip: Save yourself some time in the morning by preparing the filling and topping the night before. It can be stored {separately and covered} in the frig overnight. We put the apple filling into the ramekins, place them in a large casserole dish and store them that way. We leave the crumbly topping in the mixing bowl and cover that. You will need to rework the crumbly topping a little bit before sprinkling it over the filling, because storing in the refrigerator will cause it to want to stick together into one large crumb!