Fruit Leather Snacks

When I was little I used to love going to the health food store with my mum on Saturday mornings. They used to sell these little fruit leather snacks and we used to go with the intention of stocking up for the week's lunch boxes. They rarely made it to when we got home, let alone through the week for our packed lunches. I decided to experiment the other day as I had a load of apples left (they were on offer and I couldn't resist buying 3 kilos of them!) so made up a big batch of apple compote. I put the oven on as low as it could go, spread it over a square silicone cake mould and hoped for the best. This was the result! 

Ingredients

4 apples

1 tsp cinnamon 

100ml water

Method

1. Peel, core and chop the apples into small chunks (around 1cm).

2. Put into a saucepan over a low heat with the cinnamon and water and simmer gently until the apples are soft and starting to go mushy.

3. Using a hand blender, mush the apples until they're blended and resemble a smooth sauce.

4. Cool the sauce and spread over a silicone baking sheet. You need something square or rectangular thats shallow to be able to spread it thinly. You want to get it as smooth as possible and only about 1 or 2 mm thick. Thin and smooth is all that matters.

5. Bake for about 6 hours on the lowest setting on your oven. If you leave it in too long you'll end up with an apple crisp rather than soft leather strips. 

6. Leave to cool then cut into strips with scissors. 

Tips

- Try using other fruit in with the apple such as strawberries or pears.

- Roll them up into little rolls to make them fun for kids to eat. 

- Use a cookie cutter to cut them into shapes for kids. 

- Try making some applesauce with no cinnamon. Take out a small amount of the cooled sauce and add the cinnamon to that. Pipe it in diagonal lines across the spread out apple sauce on the tray to give a stripy effect. Bake as normal and you'll have stripy fruit leather! You could also make a cinnamon free apple sauce and pipe the lines in a strawberry compote to make it multicoloured and stripy. Play around with it! It's so simple and is inevitably delicious so even if it doesn't look like it'd win any beauty pageants, it'll sure taste delicious! 

Enjoy!