Super Easy Baked Apples

Here's another delicious fruit-based dessert to try: Baked Apples with Chai-Spiced Maple Syrup.

These lovely apples, like almost everything I make, are super fast, super easy, and make you feel like you're eating something healthy. The Cooking Light recipe comes to 184 calories per apple, and, as always, I switched out some of the maple syrup for sugar-free and some of the butter for Brummel & Brown. So, from Cooking Light's below recipe, I used 1/8th cup maple syrup and 1/8th cup sugar-free syrup and got it down to 148 calories an apple.

Recipe:

• 4 small apples, cored
• 2 tablespoons butter, chilled and cut into 4 equal pieces
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

I'm also pretty sure I skipped the pepper, because, whatever, it's a dessert. Your steps? Very simple:

1. Preheat oven to 450°.
2. Put apples in a baking dish and place butter in the middle of the apples. Combine remaining ingredients and pour over apples. Cover dish with foil, bake for 25 minutes or until tender. Let cool and stuff your face!

These were very tasty -- I liked them better than our "streusel"-filled baked pears. Still pretty sweet, thanks to the syrup, and very easy to make, even on a weekend. Combine with a stove-top dinner and you can have dessert almost as soon as you're done your main course.

Ease: 9
Taste: 8
Comfort: 7.5