Waste not, want not.

I had some leftover heavy cream from a meal I'd made the other day, and rather than let it go to waste I decided to use it for the most practical application of heavy cream that I could think of: whipped cream. I'd never done it before, and as it turns out, it's pretty easy to make.


Combine 1 cup heavy cream, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon of sugar in a bowl. One recipe I found suggested putting the bowl and whisk in the freezer for ten minutes beforehand. I followed the suggestion but I'm not sure whether or not it was necessary.


Using the whisk attachment on an electric mixer, beat the cream until soft peaks begin to form. I recommend stopping every so often to check the progress, as if you beat it too long it will turn to butter (or so I'm told). Making butter would be interesting too...but I'm not sure I care enough to try it out.


Of course, now that I had all this whipped cream I needed something to spoon it on top of. I had two apples in my fridge, as well as some leftover streusel topping from these muffins I'd made a couple weeks ago (I really hate wasting stuff). So the obvious answer was to make an apple crisp.


I peeled and chopped the apples and coated them with cinnamon and sugar. Then I added some old-fashioned oats, flour, and melted butter to the streusel topping until it had a good consistency. It's not too far off from the usual recipe I follow for making apple crisp (1 cup flour, 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup old-fashioned oats, 1/2 cup melted butter).


Then just cover the apples with the topping, bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, and in this case added a dollop of whipped cream. There's still some whipped cream left, which means that tomorrow I'll be making hot cocoa again. I'm pretty sure that before Christmas I had vowed to cut down on the desserts after the holidays, and I'm also pretty sure that I was talking crazy.