Apple Pie Cobbler, for a Crowd

INGREDIENTS

Apples

• 4 lbs. peeled and diced apples
• 1 stick unsalted butter
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• ¼ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 4 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 6 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp. ground cardamom

Cobbler

• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 6 tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. salt
• 4 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp. ground cardamom
• 3 cups granulated sugar
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• 4 cups whole milk
• 2 sticks unsalted butter

STEPS

1. Peel and dice your apples. They don’t need to be perfect—a little skin is okay—or evenly diced. They’ll look rustic. For the best flavor, use a combination of sweet and tart apples. If possible, mix 3-4 honeycrisp apples with 10-15 small, tart apples your friends picked, climbing onto the roof of their home and filling a bucket for you. If you don’t have homegrown apples from friends, store-bought granny smiths are fine.
2. Grab your largest dutch oven—probably the one your mother gave you, the one you baked your first loaf of bread in. In that dutch oven, melt one stick of unsalted butter over medium-low heat. Once the butter is melted, add the apples, brown sugar, lemon juice, flour, and spices. Mix and let sit for about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Once the apples have begun to soften, remove from the heat.
3. Preheat the oven to 350℉ and grease your baking dishes. You can use 8x6 or 8x8 or 9x9—whatever you have. This recipe makes 4-5 cobblers, so you will likely need to use an assortment of sizes, unless you happen to be the kind of person who has 5 different 8x8 baking dishes. If you do, why?
4. Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom in a large bowl. Set aside.
5. Mix the granulated sugar, brown sugar, milk, and melted butter in a different bowl. Whisk thoroughly.
6. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour your wet ingredients in the center. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry. It’s probably easiest to do half at a time, but you didn’t think of that until you had already poured the entire bowl of wet into dry. Oh, well. Stir carefully. Try not to spill.
7. Carefully, add one cup of the batter into the bottom of each of your assorted, greased baking dishes.
8. Spoon the pre-cooked apples into each baking dish. Try to do it evenly. Add a few extra to the dish for your apple-growing friends, and to the dish you need to return to the friend that gave you this cobbler recipe. Instead of returning an empty container, you thought it would be nicer to return it filled with cobbler—trading blackberry for apple.
9. Once your apples are spread evenly into each baking dish, top with another cup of the cobbler batter. Maybe a little more goes on one, a little less on another. Make it even enough across each randomly-sized dish.
10. Haphazardly assemble each dish on 2-3 baking sheets. In an ideal world, you’d bake these one at a time, but you don’t have all day to bake multiple cobblers separately; the baking sheets will make it easier to move them around in the oven.
11. Bake for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, take them out and switch positions—dishes on the bottom go on the top, and vice versa, and the ones near the back of the oven should now be at the front.
12. Bake for another 20-30 minutes. (If you want a little extra flair, you can pull them out after 20 minutes, add a sprinkle of raw sugar to the tops, and put back in the oven for an additional 5-10 minutes. It’s up to you, but it will impress your friends.) Remove from the oven and set on wire racks to cool.
13. Allow the cobblers to cool for at least 5 minutes before digging in. While you wait, ask yourself, what am I going to do with these extra cobblers? You had to use the apples before they went bad, but you hadn’t really considered the cobblers not being gifted to friends. One is for you, obviously, so that leaves two. Decide to divide them up between loved ones: some for your parents, some for your grandmother, some for your partner’s mother—who has gotten into baking and just brought you two slices of triple berry pie, her first one—some for whoever else you might see soon who holds a special place in your heart.

NOTES

• This recipe made five cobblers in the following sizes: one 8x8 ceramic baking dish, two 8x6 glass baking dishes, one 9x9 glass baking dish, and one 9x9 aluminum baking dish.
• Homegrown apples are smaller, and different sizes, so the number of apples used may differ; as long as you get to 4 lbs. of apples, you'll be fine.
• You don't have to precook the apples, but this adds more flavor and helps them soften, so that you don't have any hard chunks in your cobbler(s). That would be embarrassing!
• When your friends tell you the apples are tart, so add "a lot" of sugar, believe them. Don't take a bite, thinking there's no way they could possibly be that tart. You'll regret it.
• Similarly, when your friends give you their apples and you promise to bake them something with said apples, so they offer to come over and help peel them, take them up on it. You'll think, "I can peel all of these apples! It won't even take that long!" But you'll be wrong. Let them help peel apples.