I kind of stole this idea from 
Anyway, I saw the apples and thought - I've seen those. Looking up on my mom's apple tree the other day, a tree that produces the world's best apples (it won the price for around 10 years in a row, until I moved to Ecuador) for everything. We made juice out of it, sauce, chunky sauce, compote, snacks, baked apples, fried apples, apple pancakes, apple cakes, apple-Quarkauflauf (kind of a weird cheesecake), red cabbage with apples... what shrimp were for Baba, apples are for me.
That's where they were, some already pecked a little by the many birds that choose my mom's little paradise shelter as winter quarter. Mom always has an eye on possibilities for animals to stay for winter, leaving things untouched even though they look "messy" that way. But being greeted by robins while installing her new solar system, standing 1m before me, curiously watching why on earth I install a solar panel when the sun is only out and about for around 7h a day, tops. Excellent question, little bird. Because it makes mom happy.
The tree is majestic. I was big when we moved in here 32 years ago, so I'd say it has 50+ years. It was trimmed once in a decade I think, but I don't quite remember. It still provides huge amounts of fruits, fairly shared between my mom, friends and the animal realm. Next to the tree grows a rose, and what you can see as leaves in the picture, is just that rose, having climbed the tree over the years. I think the rose was planted by my mom. The symbiosis between the two of them is a beautiful thing to see.
The crumble came out quite amazing. The crumble cake not so much, I think mom's yeast was a little too old already - the dough didn't rise, and it was more like a apple crumble pizza. Delicious, though, too, but I like some spongy dough beneath the fruit. I had to improvise quite a bit on the recipe, since mom likes whole grain an such better and didn't have enough white flour (used spelt instead) nor oat-oat flakes (again, spelt flakes) for the crumbles. But she did have vegan butter! That's so much better than the palm fat style that I use in Ecuador.
As always, Lily and I got a little enthusiastic about the amount of ingredients, so I had enough apples and crumble left for three little bowls of thin layered apple crumble, of which Lily ate two and mom one. For me, the cake was enough, had a big slice.
The apples were perfect. As always - but it's December! I plugged apples from a tree in December at around 5°C and they were fine (after cutting out the bird pecked parts). I don't remember that from the last times I was here. Then again, maybe we just always harvested all of them, which is quite likely. But this is just another reason for the tree to win the "World's Best Apples Tree" award.
Do you have a tree that is very special to you? And why?
(I just checked the 