Apple Pie Oatmeal Cookie Cups

One of my favorite traditions we’ve developed over the past five or so years is going to the local orchards in the fall and picking up a bunch of apples. You can read about my trip from a couple of years ago, if you like.

Well, apple picking means apple desserts. Usually we just make pies or apple crisps or crumbles, or even just apple chips, but I wanted to try something a little different this time around. All the same ingredients are there, the apples and the spices and the oats, but in a new form.

This recipe has two parts. The first part is an oatmeal cookie, formed into a cup shape using muffin tins and a shot glass. The second part is an apple pie filling you can make to spoon into the cups, to assemble the delicious treat.

Recipe Variations

There are a few things you can do differently with this recipe if you want. For one thing, I use a pumpkin spice mix that I’ll talk about a bit later; you can use mostly just cinnamon if you prefer something a little milder, but I find it loses some nuance to the flavors if you do.

The biggest variation is size. You can make full size muffin cup cookies, or you can make mini cups. The mini cups are a little harder to make since you can’t just use a shot glass to form them (since it turns out that a shot glass is the perfect size for forming the cups in a standard muffin tin) but it’s still not that bad to make. I used the tip of a lemon juicer, which was a little awkward but worked if I was careful.

Another option is just to use any other fruit you feel like using. These are basically little mini cookie-pie hybrids, and you can fill them with any pie filling you like. I think they would be delicious with cherry or mixed berry filling, in particular.

What Kind of Apples to Use?

There have been tons of blog posts written about the best kinds of apples to use for various purposes. I’m sure they’re all very good, but there’s a couple of problems with them.

The first is that there are so many different varieties of apples these days. Our orchard alone has something like 15 varieties, many of which are relatively new cultivars, so they don’t show up in any of those lists.

Another issue is that they’re just not as impactful as people think. Get good, fresh apples from an orchard if you can, or get in-season apples from a store or farmer’s market. Getting out of season apples, even if it’s a “better” variety, is probably going to give you worse results. The best apples are fresh apples.

For reference, for my recipe I used Honeycrisp, Crimson Crisp, and Pixie Crunch. They’re just what I had bought last time I was at the orchard, and they’re delicious.

The moral of the story is, use the apples you find tasty. If you pick a variety you don’t like just because someone on the internet tells you they’re “better” for the recipe, you’re still just using an ingredient you don’t like. Personally, I always say it’s better to have a recipe that turns out a little less than perfect than to force yourself to use “perfect” ingredients for something you won’t like as much.

What’s That Spice Mix?

In my recipe, I call for “pumpkin pie spice.” It’s really more of a generic autumn spice mix, useful just as much in apple recipes as in pumpkin recipes, so I hesitate to call it pumpkin spice. It’s just cinnamon with some extras to enhance the taste, and it’s better in pretty much all of the same purposes, in my opinion.

To make a batch that you can use in all sorts of recipes, use this:

• 3 Tablespoons of Ground Cinnamon
• 2 Teaspoons of Ground Ginger
• 2 Teaspoons of Ground Nutmeg
• 1.5 Teaspoons of Ground Allspice
• 1.5 Teaspoons of Ground Cloves

Mix it all up, store it in an air-tight jar, and use it anywhere plain cinnamon is called for. If you don’t like how much of a kick it has, you can dial back some on the ginger and cloves, but when you use it in a sweet treat like with apples, it balances out very nicely. Give it a try!

Anyway, that’s enough preamble. On with the recipe!