Solar Baked Apples: Windshield Shade Cooker - Success At Last!

It was suggested that we should stop measuring the temperature in our solar oven experiments, and actually cook something! Since it was sunny again this morning, we thought it wouldn't hurt to give the windshield shade solar cooker one more try (look back a couple of posts if you don't know what a windshield shade cooker is). Today's trial was baked apples.

I chose baked apples for nostalgic reasons. For about a year after we purchased our first microwave oven, in my early childhood, it was used almost exclusively for baking apples. I'm guessing that's because my mother didn't know what else to do with it, and really didn't want to relearn how to cook her favorite dishes. Since, we've had limited success with our solar cooker so far, I figured we'd go back to the basics.

We chopped up two apples and placed them, skin on, into our pan, topping them with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Then we placed our pan onto the tinfoil covered base, with the Pyrex mixing bowl on top. The whole shebang went onto the rack inside the windshield shade.

After about four hours, we had well baked apples! They were probably actually done after about three hours, but we didn't want to take any chances. The microwave still has the sun beat for speed, but there is something very satisfying about a solar success.

It's great to be a homeschooler!