Baked Apple Recipe with Delicious Fruit Mincemeat

My mum always told me that baked fruit is good for you, and she cooked it regularly for us. I think she was right because the last time I went to the doctor with a terrible cough and cold, he told me to eat baked apples!

I remember my grandmother cooking them for us when the winter closed in and we always thought they were delicious, especially with custard.

This recipe is even more delicious, a baked apple recipe that I'm sure would make anyone feel better. It is a warming, seasonal, delicious recipe.

Every autumn we go out to pick cooking apples and store them away in our shed ready to use during the winter. They are plentiful where we live, they line the lanes alongside the blackberries, and nobody seems to want them, so we often have more than we can cope with!

We love to cook all sorts of delicious apple recipes and this one is definitely one of my favorites. It's very quick and easy to make too.

You do need quite large apples but smaller ones will work if you serve up two each, because they are so delicious!

Mincemeat is a very sweet mixture of dried fruit and spices, including clove, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. Originally mincemeat also contained meat or suet but it doesn't anymore.

It is a very old English recipe that dates back to the 15th century, when they used this sticky sweet mixture to fill pies. Back in Tudor days pies were baked as a way of preserving meat, and the mincemeat was added to help this process.

They would wrap the meat in the pastry and bake it, just as we do today, unlike us, they threw the pastry away because it was not edible.

We still use mincemeat here in the UK to fill pies, but they are now sweet pies that we eat at Christmas time. We call them Mince Pies.

They have come to epitomize Christmas, and are served after main course of Christmas lunch with the Christmas pudding! They are also eaten at teatime all through December.

Mixing Apples with Mincemeat

The combination of apple with fruit mincemeat is much more tasty than I was anticipating. I don't really like very sweet things, and so I don't often eat mince pies at Christmas. But this is different!

The combination of tart apples cutting through the sweetness of the mincemeat works perfectly. The mincemeat gives the baked apple more texture and contrasts beautifully with the creamy smooth apple.

They would be perfect for serving on thanksgiving evening after your lunchtime festive meal because they are very light.

A simple baked apple recipe isn't difficult to find, but by adding mincemeat then you will be giving your family a very special seasonal treat. I serve them with plain yoghurt because it cuts through the sweetness so nicely.

PS if you really want to add a punch to this recipe add a small amount of brandy to the mincemeat!

Please let me know what you think of them. Here's a link to another of my apple recipes How to Make Apple Pie Taste Yummier! it is just as delicious and easy to make.

Here's another really easy recipe I love that uses apples: Delicious Apple Filled Croissants and another Sunken Apple Cake

Do you go out picking apples in the autumn? In the UK the apples and berries start to ripen at the end of August and are ready to be picked by mid September. There are blackberries in their thousands to be picked, and we find wild mushrooms too! All on the outskirts of London. They taste all the better because they are fee!!

What kind of things do you find in your neck of the woods?

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