An Apple Crisp for A Friend's Birthday!

Two Mondays ago, my wonderful friend Sarah celebrated her birthday.  In honor of her entering another year of life, we decided to have a little birthday dessert celebration for her at our church small group.  Because I love to experiment with dessert recipes, I volunteered to take on this aspect of the celebration.  Sarah said she wanted an apple or peach crisp.  I said let's do it.

Because I was cooking for other people and because it was a birthday celebration, I didn't feel comfortable just improvising with the dessert like I normally do while baking.  I knew I needed a solid apple crisp recipe that would not disappoint.  After doing some research on my favorite cooking websites, I came across an apple crisp on allrecipes.com that looked out of this world.  Here's the link to the original website's recipe: Apple Crisp II.  At the time approximately 3,150 people had reviewed this dessert and had given it a whopping 4.5 out of 5 stars.  As I studied the reviews and recipe, I decided if that many people can review a dessert and it is still ranked so high, it has got to be amazingly good!

And this recipe was so good!  Everyone at small group just ate it up and seemed to really enjoy it.  We topped the apple crisp with a dollop of cool whip but that could have easily been replaced with some type of ice cream.  If you could find a cinnamon ice cream and put that on top of this dessert, this dessert would be over the top in deliciousness.

Below is my journey in recreating this birthday apple crisp.  I added a little cinnamon here and there but overall left the recipe just about the same as the original.  I just remembered that I also halved both sugars.  So to clarify, other than halving the amounts of white and brown sugars called for in the original recipe and adding a little cinnamon to the crumble crust, I did not change anything else.  Maybe one day I will stop making improvisations and actually follow the ingredients and directions a recipe calls for...

Until then (which in all honesty probably won't be happening any time soon), I hope you enjoy this recipe!