Stovetop Baked Apples~With Recipe!

I used brown bread here, it's not quite as good as white bread
for this, but you can fool yourself into thinking it's healthy
since you are eating fruit and whole grains!

This amazing dessert can be eaten as breakfast as well. I cook thinly sliced Granny Smith apples in a frying pan over medium heat with some butter until they are soft and the skin is slightly discolored. Then I scoop them out, leaving as much butter in the pan as possible and fry up some white bread squares in the left over butter (and some extra if you want to add it). I pour some heavy cream over the apples, top them with the croutons and finally sprinkle a little sugar over the whole thing. If you want this for breakfast (something I highly recommend), just leave off the sugar and heavy cream and use whole grain bread instead of white bread. It also makes a great midnight snack, just leave off the cream and sprinkle about 1/2 tsp of cinnamon on the apples in the pan just as they start to get soft.

Ingredients for dessert version:
1 Granny Smith Apple, or other crisp apple, cored and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon unsalted butter for pan (plus extra if needed to add before the bread)
1 slice white bread, cut into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon sugar (or to taste)
2 tablespoons cold heavy cream (or to taste)

Serves 1 greedy person or 2 normal people for dessert and midnight snack, 1 for breakfast.

These quantities can be doubled easily (don’t double the butter), however if you do more than double you may need to make it in batches unless you have an exceptionally large sauté pan.

Earl Grey Cookies

This is the frozen dough, just like store bought slice-and-bake cookies, only much better!

These cookies, from Martha Stewart's Cookies, are a homemade slice-and-bake cookie.  Once the dough is made you roll it into a log and freeze it.   Then you can slice it and bake as many or as few cookies as you want.  (I actually made this dough about a month ago - I made some as a gift for a friend, and froze the rest - and just sliced and baked some more last night.) A whole batch makes about 80 cookies so it is great to keep in the freezer and just slice and bake a few whenever you want them.  The cookies get their name from the addition of earl grey tea leaves to the dough.  They also have orange zest in them, which brings out the bergamot flavor of the tea and makes the cookies taste a bit citrus-y.

Apple Spice Coffee Cake

This is from the Williams Sonoma cookbook Muffins.  It is a really great cookbook, and I highly recommend it.  This also happens to be a great cake, that I also highly recommend.  Unfortunately I cooked it 10 minutes longer than the recipe said to and it was still gooey in the center.  That didn't stop me from eating about half of it, but still, it would have been a bit better fully cooked through. The problem was all the apple (not that it was a problem for the taste, just for the cooking).  There are 4 apples chopped up in the batter which is absolutely delicious, but it is makes it hard to use a toothpick to see if the cake is cooked, because it comes out with apple on it but not batter or crumbs.  

The cookbook suggests making a glaze with heated condensed milk, but I didn't want to open whole can to use a few tablespoons, so I made my own vanilla glaze.  I used powdered sugar, mixed with a few drops of vanilla extract.  I added water a little bit at a time until it was smooth and spreadable (but not too runny).  I spread it on when the cake was still warm, so it got nice and smooth and shine-y.

Caramel Apples

In addition to the two types of cake I baked for Halloween, I made caramel apples.  I don't just mean I melted some pre-made caramel from a package and dipped apples in it, I mean I actually made the caramel.  I've made caramel before, but I've never made this kind before.  It wasn't hard, it was just tedious.  It is important to get the temperature right at each stage, and it takes quite a while to get to the temperatures.  But it was all worth it, because it came out really good.  One last thing, I decided that it is too hard to eat a big caramel apple and that the caramel to apple ratio isn't idea.  So I used lady apples to great effect!

Halloween Desserts

Devil's Food Pumpkins:  These are what I mentioned last night.  I was going to ice them, but unfortunately I ran out of time.  They still tasted amazing and looked good, and no one seemed to mind that they were plain.

Pumpkin Bundt Cake:  This tastes like the filling of a pumpkin pie...probably because it is made with pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.  Also, there is some flour, a couple of eggs and a bit of sunflower oil, but that really isn't what gives it its flavor.  It was also much better than pumpkin pie because it was not pie, it's cake.  (I like pie, but it isn't my favorite.)  When I say it's cake, that doesn't do it justice - it is moist and soft and absolutely delicious.  By the way, this recipe is from a cookbook of mine, Dessert University by Roland Mesnier with Lauren Chattman, that I bought this summer and have barely used, so I'm very excited that I got to make this.  One last thing, I forgot to take a photo of this before I cut it up...the slices look good but it did look a little nicer as a whole cake.