We have been experiencing a glut of apples recently, as each week we don’t get through the large number in our fruit & vegie box. Making apple cakes and apple pies just doesn’t use up enough of them for my liking, so I made apple sauce instead.

Apple sauce – or, to be more precise, cooked pureed apple – doesn’t really require a recipe, although if you want you can add cinnamon and lemon juice and all manner of things (like this). I rinsed and cut up apples into large chunks, removing the cores and any spotty bits, until I had filled my large saucepan (around 6 or 7 large apples). Add a cup of water, put the saucepan on the stove to simmer, and ignore it for between 30 to 45 minutes, until the apples are falling apart. Once it’s cooled down a little, I pureed it with a stick blender.

Some recipes require you to peel the apples, particularly if you’re making baby food – I prefer having the skins on the apples, and it’s less work, so I made sure the apples cooked until the skins were very soft, and was careful to ensure that there were no chunks of skin in the puree.

Four things to do with apple sauce:

Apple sauce for babies
Ted has just started eating solids, so I’ve planned ahead and frozen a few things for future busy days. I spooned the cooled and pureed apples into a large ice cube container. Once the cubes of apple were frozen, I sat the container out for a minute to loosen them, then put the cubes into a zip lock bag, so that we can defrost as many as we need for future meals.

Granola: crunch, delicious, and rather irresistible for breakfast.

Apple Sauce Pie: incredibly easy and delicately spiced.

Spiced Apple Sauce Cake: a lovely moist cake, but to be honest what I really enjoyed about it was how the cream cheese icing went with it.