One neat part about being a teacher that I didn’t expect is seeing all of the healthy snacks and lunches which fuel my students daily. Honestly, sometimes the thoughtfully-crafted salads and well-balanced snack lunches of nuts, fruit, veggies, cheeses, home-baked bread, etc. make me a little jealous and usually encourage me to try to include more variety in my own lunches the next day.
However, no matter what age (I teach a wide range of 2nd-11th graders!), the crème de la crème of school lunches is always that sweet treat that mom slipped in with a note. Whether it is a cupcake or a simple chocolate chip cookie, the prize is always announced and presented to the class ceremoniously, before being gobbled up with relish!
Kids love sweet school lunch snacks, but parents don’t always love the artificial colors and flavors or high fructose corn syrup in them. But why settle by choosing between healthy and exciting, when you could have both? These simple-to-make, all-natural fruit leather strips are made of nothing but fruit and vegetables, and they provide a snack that is delicious, fun to eat, and healthy.
This recipe uses just three great ingredients: our homemade Weaver’s Apple Sauce (made with 100% Weaver’s apples and no added sugar), our freshly grown strawberries, and beet juice (for color). It may take a while to bake in the oven, but this no-fuss snack is worth the wait. Once you try this recipe, you’ll end up peeling off a satisfying strip of fruit leather yourself to sample with the kids.
Kid’s Fruit Leather with Weaver’s Apple Sauce
- Prep Time: 20-30 mins
- Bake Time: 5-6 hours
- Total Time: 6 hours
- Yield: 10–12 strips 1x
- Category: Berries, Apples, Appetizers, Recipes
Ingredients
- 1 heaping cup Weaver’s Orchard Apple Sauce
- 1 quart Weaver’s homegrown strawberries, washed, trimmed and diced
- 1 beet, scrubbed, unpeeled and cubed
Instructions
- First, scrub and cube unpeeled beets. Put beet pieces into a small saucepan, just covering with water and set to a boil. Once the pot boils for a minute or two, lower to a simmer and leave uncovered.
- Meanwhile, prep strawberries by washing, trimming and thinly dice. Put diced fruit into a separate saucepan and set to medium-low heat. Stir occasionally until the strawberries cook down and become frothy and bubbly (as in jam making), about 10 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
- When the strawberries are ready, take off the heat and use an immersion blender to purée until smooth. By this point (about 20-30 mins), the beets should have created a dark juice (if not, continue simmering). Strain off the beet juice into a small jar and add to the strawberry purée to intensify the color to a vibrant red. Add the apple sauce to the strawberry mixture and blend once more to incorporate all of the ingredients thoroughly.
- Line two rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper and scoop out the fruit purée onto the sheets, spreading with a spatula until very thin (try to make an even layer that is thin, but not see-through).
- Place trays into the oven and set a timer for 2.5 hours to check and rotate racks.
- Bake for roughly 5-6 hours in total until the moisture has totally evaporated from the fruit and the leather is sticky to the touch, but no longer wet.
- Remove sheets from the oven and let cool before flipping parchment over onto a sheet of wax paper. Then, carefully peel the fruit leather off of the cooked parchment paper and onto the clean wax paper. Tightly roll up the wax paper until you get a thin tube. Use a pair of sharp kitchen scissors to cut the leather to a desired width (easily make 5-6 rolls per tube). Peel and enjoy!
Notes
This recipe would work great in a dehydrator, but the bake instructions for this recipe are for a standard oven.
Keywords: Kid’s Fruit Leather, Apple Sauce, Strawberries