Thursday, October 2, 2008

Another apple experiment

Since apples are pretty easy to work with and also pretty tasty (and grown on the West coast! Local!), I've been trying to figure out different ways to use them in delicious desserts. This past weekend my adventurous cousin made us a pear pastry using frozen puffing pastry sheets, and it was yummy, so I tried to sort-of-replicate that with apples tonight. Notes to self: grease foil before putting down pastry sheets; get baking pan. Oh, and if you've noticed that these recipes are a little iffy on the amount of each ingredient, that's because I'm not working off recipes--I just sort of throw stuff in and hope it tastes good. Okay, moving on.

Ingredients
3 golden delicious apples
6 or so little spoons sugar
1 or so big spoon cinnamon
a little less than 1/2 a stick of butter
1-1/3 pillsbury pastry sheets

The pastry sheets are easy: they come two big sheets to a box, so just cut each into thirds and pick out the four thirds you like best. For those of you not so good at math, that means you'll have four equal-sized strips of pastry sheet. Cut each strip into 4 equal squares. Do not smush the dough.

Line a baking pan with aluminum foil and lightly grease. (Lessons learned.) Put the pastry squares on the foil leaving at least an inch in between. Bake in oven for, oh, I don't know, 10 minutes or so? Until they're just shy of golden brown, but have puffed up.

Meanwhile, put the butter in a saucepan to melt (I used a medium sized pot) on LOW heat, so it doesn't burn. Add in most of the sugar and all the cinnamon, and stir til it gets kind of hot. Peel and core the apples, and slice thinly (I cut into chunks--not the best move). Add the apples to the pot. Just cook and stir, cook and stir on low heat until all the apples have deliciousness all over them and are starting to fall apart.

When you take the almost-done pastry squares out of the oven, depress the puff in the middle of half of the squares and put a generous spoonful of the apple tastiness in the middle. Distribute the apples onto the squares, then use the other half of the squares to top them, making little pastry-square-and-apple sandwiches. Sprinkle a spoonful of sugar over the top of the sandwiches for prettiness and crunch. Put the sandwiches back in the oven until the tops start to get toasty brown, then take out and let cool before eating (I learned that one the hard way).

The result:

I think they turned out really well for my first try. Next time I'm going to try with peaches before they totally fall out of season. But I think any fleshy fruit like that would work if you want to experiment.

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