My mom sautes the apples before assembling this cobbler to give them a necessary head start over the biscuits, which need little time in the oven. Get Mom’s Buttermilk Biscuit Topping recipe here. This is an old-fashioned, comforting dessert. I can’t imagine it with anything other than a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Note: The pictured cobbler also contains rhubarb, a classic if somewhat underappreciated partner to apples. While we most commonly see bright pink rhubarb in desserts (as in our Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie with Sour Cream Crust recipe, for instance), there are also pale green varieties that taste just as good.

  • Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients (8)

  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for buttering the baking dish
  • 6 large tart apples (such as Granny Smith, Pippin, or Northern Spy), peeled, cored, and cut into 1/2-inch chunks
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup fresh apple cider or unfiltered apple juice
  • 1 lemon, zested and juiced
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg
  • 1 recipe Mom’s Buttermilk Biscuit Topping

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Butter a 7 × 11-inch or 9-inch square baking dish.
  2. Melt but do not brown the 4 tablespoons of butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the apples, sugar, cider, and lemon zest and juice and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes, until the apples are tender. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cinnamon and nutmeg.
  3. Pour the apples into the prepared baking dish, scraping all the juices out of the saucepan with a rubber spatula. Let the fruit sit while you prepare the topping.
  4. Arrange the biscuits over the fruit, leaving about 1/4 inch between them. Bake the cobbler on a center rack for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the biscuit topping is golden brown and the apples are bubbling around the sides of the pan. Allow the cobbler to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. Serve warm.