Apple Crumble Sqaures

This weekend, I decided to use up a small amount of our massive amount of apples.  I'm getting tired of eating apples.  I searched for a new and easy recipe to use up some of the apples and decided Apple Crumble Squares looked the best.  Very simple to make and minimal clean-up (unless you are like me and completely miss the garbage when peeling the apples).  I made a few adjustments to the recipe, so I will share mine and here is the link to the original.

Crust and Topping:

3 cups flour

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup granulated sugar

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/4 teaspoons salt

1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 whole egg

Apple Mixture:
1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 teaspoons cornstarch

4 whole medium apples, peeled, cored, and grated

Prep Instructions:

Preheat over at 375.  Grease a 9x13 pan.

In a medium bowl, mix the flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon, and salt.  Work in the butter and egg with a pastry blender (which I don't own, so I used my hands) until pea-sized clumps form and virtually no loose flour remains.  Press half of the mix evenly into the pan.

For the apple mix, in another bowl, stir together the granulated sugar and cornstarch.  Squeeze out any excess liquid from the grated apples with your hands, then mix them into the sugar until thoroughly combined.  Sprinkle the apple mix evenly over the crust.  Crumble the remaining dough over the top of the apples. Bake for 30 minutes or until the top is slightly golden.  Cool completely before cutting into squares.

For my variations: 

 I did not have unsalted butter, so I used salted and added only a dash of salt. 

I used 4 gala apples and 1 golden delicious apple.  Seemed liked 4 was not enough. 

I sprinkled extra cinnamon over the apple mix when it was on the crust.  We like the more flavor.

You could also use more brown sugar and less granulated for the sweeter flavor. 

Sweetness will, of course, depend on the type of apples used.

Our neighbor came over for some computer help and hubby fed him some of these.  We filled the bottom of a cereal bowl with the squares and topped with ice cream.  Now my thought would be to warm the square and THEN top with ice cream.  Instead, hubby warmed it all together for 30+ seconds and we all enjoyed warm apple squares with ice cream soup!  Anyway, these bars were somewhat intended to make the journey to work with me for an office treat, but we inhaled half the pan.  Good think we have plenty of apples so I can make it again soon! 

On another note:  We received another good 8 inches of snow in our neck of the woods.  I will continue to complain about the snow and cold until Old Man Winter decides to make it worth it and give me a snow day off work! Or until it's Spring (which is just a few days away...right!?)! We finally got all bundled up to push and shovel snow away from the house around 2:00pm.  We were lazy after a big breakfast of sausage, eggs, and toast.  Anyway, we braved the cold and wind to clear our paths for the morning trek to work.  I spent a good part of the day cleaning out our "filing" system and reorganizing it into a brand new file cabinet that hubby brought me.  We can now find the receipts I thought I threw away months ago! 


This was taken a few weeks before, but I swear it looked exactly the same