Ginger Apple Crisp with Vanilla Maple Whipped Cream

Nothing says fall like a ginger apple crisp baked with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and vanilla. . . .

Since the start of the fall season, I have been craving a warm apple crisp. Complete with all the warm fall spices: ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla.

Apple Crisp is Fairly Healthy

Typically this time of year, I’m craving squash and starting to make loads of pumpkin and butternut squash pies. Not the case this year! I think it may have something to do with still trying to lose the baby weight. It feels best to avoid pie crust for at least another month if I can manage it. But then all bets are off. I may regain all the baby weight in November alone. (Just kidding, that’s not physically possible.)

So apple crisp with ginger feels very much like a fall treat, but it’s a bit healthier than pie. I think? It definitely feels like a delicious treat.

It is mostly apples, after all. Plus oats. And a bit of sugar. And you can top it with some lightly sweetened maple whipped cream (see recipe below), which is quite a bit better for you than ice cream. It’s basically just meeting your apple-a-day health requirement at this point.

That said, if you’re really looking for something a bit healthier, but you’re craving apple crisp (like I was last week) you can try my spicy baked apples, which are very much in the same category, but without the sugar and butter and flour.

Shortcuts to Making Apple Crisp Easy

Typically, you make the crumb topping by cutting cold butter into some combination of flour, sugar, oats, and spices. You can use two knives, or a fork, or a pastry cutter, and it’s a pain in the butt. The best approach is to use your hands to squeeze the butter into the flour mixture. And the reason to cut the butter into the topping is that it creates pockets of butter that melt more slowly, leading to a crisper, crumblier texture.

I get that, but I’ve started doing the crumb topping by just mixing the flour mixture with melted butter, and, frankly, I can’t tell the difference. I get a crisp, crumbly topping that tastes absolutely delicious. It’s still crisp the next day, in fact. I’m really not sure you can actually tell the difference, so my conclusion is that the butter-cutting-step is a basically frivolous exercise. Now if you’re doing this with a toddler and they want to get their hands dirty, by all means go for it. But I’m not convinced you’re really doing much to make the dessert tastier.

Also, I really don’t like getting my hands dirty. I currently justify it as a practical need, given I may need to stop what I’m doing to pull the boys off of each other at any given moment. Or my daughter off of one of the boys. Or them off of her. Really, it can go any way right now. I don’t want to be rubbing butter all over their clothes or hair as I try to extricate them from one another.

Plus every time you get butter on your hands, you have to use soap rather aggressively to strip off the grease from your hands, and then your hands get drier than they already were. And it’s fall, when my skin is already getting dry. No one has time for this. So I just melt the butter and mix it with my flour, sugar, spice, oat, etc. mixture using a spatula. So very simple.

Now, on to the recipe.

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