Fruit Leather

A few weeks ago, I got an email in my inbox from HomeMade Simple. The email was "7 steps for making a homemade fruit snack". Sometimes I don't even bother opening these emails due to the limited time in my life right now. However, since my sweetness is away from us, and care packages are a weekly must, I had to check out this email because it had the word "snack" in the title.

In a care package that I sent my husband last week, I made a special treat. I made two kinds of these fruit leathers. He received the package and did a taste test on Skype with me. First up, the Cinnamon Apple Fruit Leather. He liked this one. The second one: Strawberry-Banana Fruit Leather. His expression was priceless!! I wish I would have taken a picture because the expression cracked me up!!  So -- the Strawberry-Banana Fruit Leather is an absolute NO. NO. NO. HA HA!!

I ended up using a different recipe than the one at HomeMade Simple. I wasn't for sure about using some of those ingredients at first. So, I used this recipe instead. The one adjustment to the recipe that I made was I put 2 teaspoons of honey in the mixture, instead of 1 teaspoon. Can't go wrong with honey, right? That's the name that I call my sweetness, too, by the way. Honey is a perfect sweetener. Yummy!!

The ingredients and directions:

• 2 cups applesauce
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• cooking spray

Preheat oven to 150 degrees.

1. Mix the first 3 ingredients together.
2. Spray cookie sheet.
3. Spread a THIN layer of the mixture on the cookie sheet.
4. Leave oven door open a bit and cook for 6-8 hours.

My changes because I had 4 pans in the oven are:
I preheated the oven to 175 degrees and about halfway through the drying process I moved the temp to 200 degrees. I did NOT spray a cookie sheet. Instead, I used parchment paper and sprayed that with cooking spray. I think the parchment paper helped me take the fruit leather off of the tray -- like the plastic from a fruit roll-up. Everything else in the directions pretty much stayed the same. What you're looking for is the fruit leather to NOT be gooey to the touch, but the sticky consistency of a fruit roll-up.

I cute the piece of leather in half and then half again (so quarters). Each 1/4 section I cut in half. Then I rolled them, and wrapped them plastic wrap.

Will you try this recipe? I'm thinking about doing a fruit punch flavored fruit leather next time. Let me know what you do for ingredients and if you like it or not. So far anything strawberry (and with those little seeds) is out of the question.