3 Ways with Apple Butter

Apple Butter is a super versatile ingredient, livening up everything from sweet cakes to savory dinners. This post has 3 Ways with Apple Butter for you, with more to come!

Before I made my living writing recipes on the internet for all of you – my lovely invisible internet cooking friends – I had a zillion different jobs. Most were in the restaurant industry, one was in sales, and the job I held most immediately before taking the flying leap into self-employment, was managing this little local store. It was effectively a gas station, but it had been around for forty-ish years and the man that owned it was a tomato farmer with a reputation for the best local produce and farm fresh goods.

It was my job to keep us in stock with things like fat back, local honey, homemade candies, fried pies, hot chow chow, AND! Apple Butter.

Apple butter is not an ingredient I really cooked with before moving to the south south, where I live now. My parents were transplants to Charlotte, NC by way of Illinois. Apple butter is not something I’d ever even seen before it effectively flew off the shelves in this little country store. And then when I finally tried it, I had no idea what to do with it besides spread it on toast (FYI: DO put apple butter on toast.)

Fast forward to when I started blogging here at Sugar Dish Me – Musselman’s Apple Butter was one of the very first companies to ever reach out to work with me. I had like maybe 100 regular readers at the time, and I was so fah-reaking excited that a company wanted me to take their product and play around with it to see what I could come up with. The challenge was to get creative enough to do more than add apple butter to toast.

I made an Apple Butter Grilled Cheese.

Because apples and cheese just make sense, see?

So then I decided to wander over to the sweet side of the street with my apple butter creations, and I made this Apple Butter Spice Cake.

Holy moly, ya’ll. THIS is a cake.

Once upon a really long time ago I made Cheez-Its from Scratch and you guys loooooved that recipe. So I thought I’d do another apple cheese pairing and make Apple Butter Cheese Crackers.

What?! I know. I cross my heart that they are crazy amazing.

Sometimes when I outline a recipe for you I tuck in little product recommendations – things that work well for me in my own kitchen, products that give me reliable results, etc.

I do this for a few reasons, the first being consistency. I want my recipes to turn out for you just like they turn out for me. Nothing is more disappointing than spending time enough in the kitchen to make a pizza or bake a cake, and it not turning out right because you had wonky chocolate (it exists! I swear!) or substandard yeast. My aim is for us all to end up with the same great taste and texture, no matter what we are making.

I also want to always make sure I’m using products you can actually find. I live in a rural community and know the frustration of scouring the grocery store for an ingredient and coming up empty-handed.

Okay, and keeping it real here, I also recommend products because it helps me pay the grocery bills. BUT!!! Anything I recommend to you has to meet these requirements first. I have to love it, it has to be something I actually use all the time, and I have to be able to find it in a regular old un-fancy store. 

Musselman’s Apple Butter is allllllla that. So in addition to these 3 Ways with Apple Butter, I have teamed up with Musselman’s again this year to keep you supplied with apple butter recipes that will cover all your bases — everything from sweet to savory AND!!! There will be pizza. Just you wait.