Filed under: Fruit, On the Blogs, How To, Fall Flavors

When you get a bunch of fresh fruit, it is always tempting to try to do something with it when you know that you won't be able to eat it all at once. Berries get stirred into muffins, bananas are baked into bread, pumpkins end up as pie and apples can be anything from pie to apple sauce. Brilynn at Jumbo Empanadas decided to make up a batch of apple butter, which despite its name, is far more like a soft jelly or jam than actual butter. Her experience, cleverly illustrated, was not without incident and reminds us of one of the fundamental rules of cooking: follow a recipe when it is the first time you're making something. As much a TV chef and other professionals say that you can experiment and play with your food, even they started with a basic recipe from a book, a friend or a relative.

Brilynn's apple butter turned out in the end, but do take her advice and at least read the directions once before beginning. That way you're guaranteed a good result, stress-free cooking and, if you're lucky, you'll feel prepared enough to branch out into other types of fruit butters, including pumpkin butter or pear butter.