Fall Time ~ Canning Applesauce

I have been buying apples like crazy... see the Apple crisps I stored here. I also wanted to make homemade applesauce.  The last time I tried it I didn't follow a recipe and it was well... bad. So I did some "pinteresting" and found this blog post from Type A Parent with directions about not only how to make applesauce but how to can it as well.  Now I told my mom I wanted to can it, and she, as well as everyone else thought I was nuts "You can just freeze it you know" I must have heard a hundred times, but I really wanted to learn how to can... you see my friend Jackie, over at Born Ambitious - Born Imaginative  makes it look so stinkin' easy, and I really wanted to give it a try.  Especially with baby #2 coming, and a toddler on the loose I'd love to have some baby food made up already to go and not have to worry about preparing it all when the time comes, so anyway I wanted to attempt to can it.

Here's the ingredients list from Type A Parent's recipe, you can find the directions at the link above:

Ingredients

• 4 lbs. rinsed, peeled, cored and chopped apples
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water, apple juice or apple cider
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 1 TB lemon juice
• 1 TB vanilla extract
• 3 TB apple pie spice

I found that the 3Tbsp apple pie spice was way too much cinnamon in the first batch I made, the second I did cinnamon free (same recipe as above, with a little extra vanilla extract, and w/o the cinnamon sticks or apple pie spice), and I made a third half batch, skipped the cinnamon stick, and added only 1 tbsp of apple pie spice

So I was really busy keeping on top of all the steps, so I didn't get much for pictures for prepping, but my Mother-In-Law helped me peel the apples, I sliced them up, and my mom got all the canning jars ready... we WAY over prepared the jars, I had roughly 20lbs of apples, I way overestimated how much applesauce that would make.

So I got the canner going with boiling water, arranged the jars on the rack and proceeded to dunk it down into the water, Immediately I heard a pop and little bits of apple started floating up everywhere, we pulled up the jars and this is what I found:

the bottom busted right out of the biggest jar of cinnamon apple sauce I had.... 

So the rest of the jars got a nice applesauce/boiling water bath for 20 minutes :/

However I ended up with 3 quarts of applesauce, 1.5 pints of cinnamon, and 2.5 quarts of "plain" applesauce.  Yum!!

Now I had to make a third batch the next day to try some so that we wouldn't have to crack open any of the jars I just made, it was delicious!!