Baked Apples with Bacon & Cheese
This post is an easy recipe for baked apples loaded with brown sugar and butter, a touch of cinnamon, and baked in the air fryer until bacon is crisp. Top apples with cheese and enjoy while still warm!
Inspiration
The inspiration for this baked apple recipe came from Brenda Gantt. If you haven’t watched her on Facebook, you should! Her page s Cooking with Brenda Gantt. I watched her make these apples and they just look so good I wanted to try them.
Now baked apples aren’t something new at our house. We grew up on baked apples at home. Mother would fix them in a cast-iron skillet. She would just core the apples, fill the hole with brown sugar, and add butter. Juice from the apples would run down into the skillet and she would open the oven from time to time and spoon the juice back over the apples. They were so good. And they still are! You really need nothing but apples, brown, sugar, butter, and cinnamon.
But Brenda added bacon and cheese, so I knew I had to try it. I did want to try mine in our air fryer. We keep the Ninja Air Fryer on the counter on the back porch for quick cooking. The first time I cooked in it I tried hamburgers. They created way more smoke and steam than I wanted in the kitchen so that’s why it’s on the back porch. We do love it though and use it all time.
Ingredients
Apples (I used Fuji)
Butter
Brown Sugar
Cinnamon
Bacon
Sharp Cheddar Cheese
How to Prepare
I’m not going to do a guided recipe for this post, because the ingredients will vary for the number of apples you bake and it’s just a spoon of this and a sprinkle of that. This is one recipe that you can follow whether you bake one apple or half a dozen.
- Apples: Use firm, crisp apples like Fuji, Honeycrisp, or Granny Smith. Slice the apples in half horizontally or vertically and core. You can leave them whole too and just core. Take care not to cut through the bottom of the apple. Don’t peel them.
- Brown Sugar: Spoon a heaping spoonful of brown sugar into each apple center. Top with a pat of butter. Sprinkle with cinnamon.
- Bacon: I used thin sliced and laid about 1/2 a strip across the top of each apple.
- Bake: Preheat the oven or air fryer in my case. I did mine at 350 degrees. Ovens will vary and I’m sure air fryers do too. But 350 degrees worked for me. The bacon was crisp after 20 minutes and I turned the temp down to 300, added a bit of shredded cheddar cheese to each top, and baked for another 10 minutes.
Air Fryer
Speaking of an air fryer, we have been totally happy with our Ninja. Seems like this is the third Ninja appliance we’ve purchased over the last couple of years. Here are my affiliate links and you can take a look if interested:
We keep the air fryer on the back porch and even though it’s screened in and I have shades that roll down, it still gets dusty out there. So I bought a cover from an individual seller at Walmart. Canvas Cover.
Cook Time
I wasn’t sure how long the baked apples would take, so we preheated the air fryer to 350 and I set it for 30 minutes. After 20 minutes I checked and the bacon was already crisp. The apples still needed a few more minutes.
I turned the heat down to 300 degrees and added some shredded sharp cheddar cheese and baked for about 10 more minutes until the apples were nice and tender. They smelled so good! I just about had to fight my husband off long enough to let them sit a bit and then take them in the house.
Serve
Serve them warm and be sure to spoon some of the juice back over them! Now, there will be some bacon grease in the juice but it was pretty tasty. Refrigerate the leftovers and once they have cooled, you can remove most of the bacon fat, if you want. They reheat nicely too!
