How to Make Apple Crisp – Warning: This Disappears Fast!

This Apple Crisp is everything you want in a cozy fall dessert — warm apples, a buttery crumble topping, and that perfect balance of sweet and tart. 🍎✨

If you’re planning your Thanksgiving menu and want one dessert that’s easy, comforting, and guaranteed to please a crowd, this is it. Apple crisp comes together quickly, uses simple pantry ingredients, and fills your whole kitchen with the most amazing smell.

In today’s video, I’ll show you:

🍏 The best apples to use for baking
🧈 How to get that crisp, buttery topping just right
🔥 And how to bake it so it’s bubbling, golden, and absolutely irresistible

Serve it warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream — your family will love this one!

💛 Printable recipe:

Apple Crisp

🦃 Watch more Thanksgiving recipes:

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Oh, I’m so glad you’re here today. This is our final video in our Thanksgiving meal series for 2025, and it is a good one. We’re going to make apple crisp, and you do not want to miss it. Jump on in and make it with me. Hi, I’m Mary Catherine, and welcome to my table. I’m so glad you’re here. This has been such a fun series to put together and today’s recipe I’m really excited about. It’s such a good fall dessert. You know, those apples come in in the fall and they are so delicious at that time of year and I just love putting together some apple things and my husband really loves it. That’s one of his favorites. So, we’re going to make apple crisp, but you can make this any time of the year. It’s always delicious. I have been getting my apples ready for this dish and I’m going to show you with the last apple what you need to do. We’re going to use four to five apples, depending on how big yours are. This is my fifth apple. These were fairly medium size. You can kind of see in my hand how big it is. So, I used five apples. You just judge how big your apples are. But here’s what I like to do when I’m getting them prepared. I like to use my small knife and I go ahead and peel it. And you you can peel it however you like, but I just kind of go around and get all the peel off first. And then it makes that slicing really easy. It kind of all stays together. You just keep peeling, going around. All right, there we go. Yeah, if you get a little peel that stays on some of the apple you use, that’s okay. Not a big deal. Okay, now here’s where I like to swap to my bigger knife. And what I do, I just go down one whole side as close to the core as I can. And then I flip it around, do the same thing on this side. And then go in and make those smaller cuts. And if you get really close, like here’s a little bit of a seed, just just pull that out. But that little bit of the peel of the apple, don’t worry about that. It’s going to be fine. This is not original with me to do your apple this way. I saw it a while back and I thought it was so brilliant. So, I’m going to share it with you today, too. Um, and it’s one of those things that I’m like, why didn’t I think of that? The reason I love cutting it this way, that gives you a flat surface on your apple that you can just lay on your cutting board and it makes it so easy to make your slices. And I like to have really thin slices for this dish. So, here’s what I do. Just put the tip of your knife down on the cutting board and leave it. And then just come in and make those thin slices. And because you have that flat surface on the other side of the apple, it helps it stay in place really well. Now, look, I am not a professional chef. I don’t make perfect cuts. That one’s pretty thin, and that’s kind of what we want here. Some of them might be a little thicker than that, but they’re all close enough that it’s going to cook just fine in our dish. And so then we just go with our larger pieces. Do the same thing. Leave your tip on the cutting board. And then just come in and make your thin slices. Just watch your fingers at the end. All right. Now, we’ve got the apples ready. Let’s add a little bit to them, though. We’re going to take some brown sugar, and we don’t need a lot in the apples because our topping is going to have much more sugar. So, we’re just going to add about a tablespoon. And I’m going to kind of pack it. So, it’s a pretty good tablespoon. Okay, now we want about 2 tablebspoon of corn starch. The apples are going to get good and juicy in this dish. And so we want a little bit of corn starch just to help thicken it and make that good sweet glaze kind of around the apples. Okay, so there’s our two tablespoons of that. And then we want just a little bit of cinnamon in this. We’re going to use it again in the topping, so we don’t need a lot. I’m going to use maybe about half a teaspoon to sprinkle over the apples. Now, we’re going to add a splash of vanilla. You go half a teaspoon to a teaspoon. I’m probably going to go teaspoon. I feel like the more vanilla the better to a certain extent. Then we want to use some lemon juice. If you want to squeeze your own fresh lemon juice, that is great. I’m just going to use what’s in the bottle today. We’re going to put about 2 tablespoon of lemon juice in the apples. That’s going to kind of help balance out the sweetness in this dish and bring out extra flavor. And then the last thing that we’re going to put in our apples is just some kosher salt. And we’re only going to use a pinch of that. I’ve got some here. And I’m just going to get a little pinch in my hand in my fingers. And we’re going to sprinkle that over it. Now, let’s give this a stir. Only thing that didn’t spread around real good was that brown sugar that was packed. So, we want to be sure it all kind of spreads evenly throughout. So, just give it a stir for a minute or two until you feel like it’s evenly distributed. You can see I’m starting to get juicy already. That’s great. M. That’s going to make them good. All right, that looks pretty good. So, now we’re just going to set this aside and let it sit there while we get our topping ready. First, let’s put our flour in the bowl. We’re going to use one cup of flour. Now, we can just kind of eyeball these measurements. We don’t have to do the dip level pour. This is just our topping, so it’ll be fine. Now, we want one cup of brown sugar. And we do want it packed. So, I’m just kind of press it in there. Make sure we got a good cup. Okay, there we go. And now, we’re going to use about a teaspoon of our cinnamon. This is a tablespoon. So, I’m just going to use it and put about a fourth of it full. That’ll be good. And now, the only other ingredient we’re going to put in our topping is butter. So, I have chilled butter. This is cold, just out of the fridge. And we’re going to just go ahead and cut it up in little cubes. I’ve shown you this before on some other videos, but maybe this is the first video you’ve seen. So, I’ll show you how I do it here. Now, this is our knife. We used this for some of the apples, but it’ll be fine. It’s all going in the same dish. So, I just slice long ways. And then I kind of flip it and we slice long ways again. And then we come back and we just make our little cuts. We’re going to end up with just perfect little cubes of butter like that. It’s going to make it much easier to work into our flour and brown sugar mixture. I’m going to go ahead and mix this a little bit first before we add that butter. I think it just makes it a little bit easier to do it this way. That way we don’t end up with big big chunks of our brown sugar because we can kind of help get those lumps out first. Mixing with the flour helps that as well. So anyway, okay, that’s looking pretty good. Now, let’s just dump all of our butter in here. Just like that. There’s one that got away. Okay. Now, at this point, you can use a pastry blender if you want to, but you can also just use your hands. That’s what we’re going to do today. So, I’m just going to kind of get some flour and sugar mixture in my hands, and we’re just going to kind of start working it in. We want to get this butter a little bit smaller. We want to get it incorporated throughout. And we want it to be about the size of a pee. You know, the little green English peas. That’s about what you’re going to be looking for. So just keep kind of you kind of have to mash it with your hands like this when you feel some of the the butter there. So keep mashing it trying to get the flour around it. That way it doesn’t stick to your hands too terribly. You can see it’s starting to look a little bit smaller throughout. Still a few bigger pieces. So I’m going to keep working it a little bit more. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. When we pour it in, if we see another bigger piece or two, we can always work on it a little bit at that point. But I think we’re about ready to pour this on top of our apples. So, let’s do that now. Okay. And we’re just going to kind of spread it all across the top so we can get some of the crispiness in every bite. Yep. I think that did pretty well with the butter. Looks good. It’s ready to go in the oven. We’re going to bake it at 350° for about 40 to 50 minutes. So, I’m going to start with 40 minutes. It’s been 35 minutes. Let’s get our apple crisp out. M. You see some of the apple coming out in little spots. Smells delicious. Okay. So, let’s give it a taste. It’s really hot. I’m going to put a little bit in a bowl just with a little bit of ice cream on top. You can see that ice cream melt all over it. Our apples feel good and tender under there. And see them. Now, we’ve got our little topping here. I really like that. You know, it’s one of those dishes that may not look very impressive in the pan, but it’s so good. And I love this recipe because we didn’t put a lot of sugar in the apples themselves. They have a lot of sweetness to them anyway, but it really balances out with that topping that does have sweetness, so it’s not overly sweet. It’s just a good hearty apple crisp. It’s really delicious. Well, thank you so much for joining me today at Mary Catherine’s Table. I’m always happy that you’re here. Remember to hit subscribe and ring the bell if you want to get notifications as we come out with new videos. Share us with your friends. We’d love to have them come along for the ride, too. And remember to go out today, find someone who needs some kindness, and give them some of yours.