Here’s what date night looks like after 34 years of marriage. Gone are the days of candlelit dinners in the dining room at home. We stand at the kitchen island. He is peeling 12 pounds of apples and I am dicing them up to convert them into mini apple crisps for the freezer. We used to cook together all the time when we first started dating. But then I became a professional cook and took over kitchen duties. I had forgotten how nice it is to cook together. Granted, the CFL weekly highlights were on TV in the background, but still, it was quality time.

I had a big bag of my go-to crisp topping in the freezer so making these went really quickly. We still had about 5 mini crisps left to cover with the crumble, but we ran out of topping. I found a bag of oat crumble in the freezer, leftover from my Maple Crunch Birthday cake. My husband suggested we top the remaining apples with this topping so we tried it. We baked the tray of crisps and had a taste test. The oat crumble topping was fantastic.I played around with the recipe a bit and had the brilliant idea of using Speculoos cookies instead of oatmeal cookies. Gingersnap cookies would make an excellent substitute if you can’t find Speculoos (also called Biscoff). I added some chopped pecans and rolled oats for a bit more texture. This crisp topping is sweet but with a spicy ginger bite. A perfect complement to the apples.

With a scoop of vanilla ice cream, they were the perfect end to date night.

Click here to print recipe for Speculoos Apple Crisp.