A shout out goes to Mrs. Robert Maki, wherever she may be and who ever she is, for this recipe my Grandmother saved for sour cream apple squares. Also, congratulations on the $25,000. I have some eggnog ice cream in the freezer that I wanted to enjoy with a warm cake of some kind, and luckily I also had all of the ingredients for this recipe. This recipe is pretty straight forward, but here are a few notes:
Whenever there is an option for butter or margarine, I always use unsalted butter.
I used walnuts for the chopped nuts, which goes great with apple.
Two teaspoons of cinnamon instead of one. One extra teaspoon of cinnamon in a recipe of this size wouldn't be overpowering.
I had a bunch of small apples in the house from Imperfect Produce. Four, approximately baseball sized apples, was a perfect 2 cups for this recipe.
I thought it was weird how this recipe calls for softened butter. Usually when making a crust, it calls for cold butter and some kind of ice cold liquid. But I usually follow a recipe unless something seems wildly off. After the flour, brown sugar, butter, and nuts were mixed together, it felt like lightly damp sand. It was not moist enough to hold a shape, but I leveled it even as much as I could, and pressed down on the surface to keep it level.
The cinnamon, baking soda, salt, sour cream, vanilla, and egg quickly mixed into the remaining crumb mixture. When all of the ingredients were combined, I folded the diced apples in with a rubber spatula. I then took large spoonfuls of the batter, spooned it on top of the crumbs, and gently smoothed it down to be even.
Each layer ended up being about 3/4 inch thick. When baking, I usually plan on setting a timer for half of the cook time to rotate the pan. For this recipe, I baked it for 25 minutes while rotating it halfway though. I then ended up cooking it for 15 minutes longer to give it a more solid foundation and a consistent golden brown crust. After 40 minutes total of cooking, it still didn't have a clean toothpick test. However, after it sat and cooled down, it was cooked through, moist and delicious!
Wait until it is cooled throughout to get the cleanest cut, and reheat it afterwards if you would like to enjoy it warm. I recommend eating it warm with a scoop(or two) of ice cream. Enjoy!!