Apple Pie: Two Ways

About a month ago I got all these apples at an Amish farm about 1/2 hour from where we live. Some of them were delicious and we made applesauce with them. Then others were just plain . . . plain (this is not an Amish joke).  They were bland. And I've been thinking of ways to use them (I think there are actually about a dozen still left). One of my ideas was to use them for jazzed-up pies. 

The first pie (pictured on the right) was traditional, the way my husband makes them: sliced apples piled high, then dumped out and tossed with lemon juice, sugar, and cinnamon and dumped back in. Or something like that. He usually finishes his apple pies off with a crumb topping, but I had plenty of pastry dough so I double-crusted mine.  Spoiler: this turned out to be the better of the two pies.  If it ain't broke, right?

The second way was an experiment for peanut-butter apple pie. My idea was to simply make crumbs as for a peanut butter pudding pie (peanut butter mixed with powdered sugar) and layer that with the apple slices. Sounds good, right? It turned out okay. Which is to say the crumbs kinda just got wet, and the apples didn't seem to cook through as well as they did in the traditional pie. Was it too many vents (cute hearts though they be?) that let the steam out instead of trapping it to cook the apples? Who knows. But I think if I tried this another time, I would make some sort of creamy peanut butter sauce and just put it under the apples because--as my apple-pie-expert husband points out--when you eat apples with peanut butter it's normally just a smear of peanut butter on one side of the apple. At least that's how we do it around here. 

 Any other suggestions?