Apple pie

What better way to warm the cockles of the heart in deepest, darkest winter than with a slice (or two) of homemade pie? Lately my pie of choice has been the humble apple pie.

Perfectionist that I am, I’ve put a lot of effort into working out how to end up with apple filling that, while not looking like complete goo, has no “crunch” left in it. I mean, if Sara Lee can do it, why can’t I?

I Googled high and low for an answer, but every forum I found was discussing the opposite of my question – offering suggestions on how to keep a pie from being too gooey and too mushy. So I set out to do the footwork by myself.

After trying golden delicious, red delicious, royal gala, granny smith, fuji; not pre-cooked, slightly pre-cooked, completely stewed; roughly chopped, diced, thinly sliced; and various combinations of all of the above, my mind is made up. I’m hope you’re not too disappointed with what I discovered: my best result came from using tinned pie filling. For serious. It’s the holy grail of apple pie. Here’s a photo of some.

If you’re turning up your nose at the very notion of using tinned apples, see my “Tips” section at the bottom of this post for an alternative. But because I don’t like any “crunch” at all in my pies, I’m sticking to the tinned stuff.

Ingredients

250 g unsalted butter, chopped

600 g plain flour

1 tsp salt

(Up to) 6 Tbs cold tap-water

3 x 400 g tins sliced apple pie fruit

250 g caster sugar

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 egg

1 Tbs milk

Extra caster sugar for sprinkling

Method

1. Grease a 23 cm pie tin or tart tin.
2. In an electric mixer set on low speed, mix together flour, butter and salt until a sandy consistency. Without stopping the mixing, add 2 Tbs tap water and allow to mix in completely, then repeat with another 2 Tbs tap water. The mixture should start coming together a little bit; add up to another 2 Tbs tap water (so that’s 6 Tbs in total) until the dough comes together in a few large lumps. Be careful not to add more water than you need.
3. Turn off the mixer and push the dough together into a ball with your hands. Wrap the ball of dough in cling film and leave to rest for 1½ hours.
4. Preheat oven to 170ºC. Empty the cans of tinned apple into a large bowl and stir in caster sugar and ground cinnamon.
5. Place a bit more than half the dough on a lightly-floured bench or board, and roll out into a rough circle shape about 3 mm-thick with a rolling pin. Using the rolling pin underneath the dough to support it evenly, carefully lift the dough into the prepared pie tin. Shape the dough into the tin, lightly pressing it into corners and over the edges.
6. Pour in the apple mixture.
7. Whisk the egg and milk together in a cup with a fork. Using a basting brush, baste the overhanging rim of the pie with egg and milk mixture (this will help “glue” the lid on later). Retain the egg and milk mixture for use in Step 8.
8. With the remaining dough, repeat Step 5 to create the pie lid and carefully lift it on top of the pie. Cut around the outside of the pie with a sharp knife to remove excess pastry. Shape the excess pastry into shapes such as leaves, and press patterns into them with the blunt edge of the knife. Firmly press the tines of a fork all the way around the edge of the pie seal the “lid” shut and to decorate. Thoroughly baste the entire top of the pie with the egg and milk. Add the leaf decorations to the top of the pie, then baste them also.
9. Sprinkle extra caster sugar over the top of the pie. Use the sharp knife to make at least 3 small slits in the pastry through which air can escape through during cooking.
10. Bake in preheated oven for  35–40 minutes. Serve hot or cold with cream or ice cream.

Serves 8

sandy consistency

Tips

• If you really don’t want to use tinned apples, instead create your own filling from 1.3 kg of peeled, chopped apples. Stew them in a large saucepan over low heat in a small amount of water until the apples reach your desired consistency. Drain if necessary. Cool apples, then stir in caster sugar and cinnamon.
• The best “real apple” to use in apple pies is supposedly the granny smith, but I think the golden delicious and sun downer taste even better. And you don’t have to stick with one type of apple – mix together two or three of your favourites.
• If you realise you haven’t rolled your pastry thinly enough and it’s not going to be big enough, don’t try to “make do”! Put it back on the bench and keep rolling until it is big enough. A bit of extra handling isn’t going to kill it.

Remove excess pastry with a sharp knife

Press the tines of a fork into pasty edge to decorate

Turkish delight

 I have always said that if I had to choose one chocolate bar to live on for the rest of my life (do you torture yourself with these hypothetical food questions too?), I would pick Fry’s Turkish Delight. The reason would not be that, as the wrapper claims, it has “60% less fat*”,  but simply that it tastes fresh, isn’t too rich, and has a unique flavour. So this week I set about trying to recreate the taste at home.

While I really don’t think I managed to replicate the exact flavour and jelly-like consistency of a bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight, I have accomplished microwaveable Turkish delight (loosely based on a Super Food Ideas recipe) very similar to the boxed kind that you buy at the supermarket covered in icing sugar, and added some chocolate (a fetish I alluded to in my last post).

You might be interested to learn that the original name for Turkish delight is lokum. It was introduced to Britain after a British traveller tasted some in Istanbul – and was obviously as delighted by it (see what I did there?) as you will be if you try out my recipe.

Ingredients

750 ml hot tap-water

35 g powdered gelatine

500 g caster sugar

120 g cornflour

150 g soft icing sugar mixture

¼ tsp cream of tartar

2 tsp rosewater

4 drops red food colouring

200 g good quality chocolate, roughly chopped
Extra soft icing sugar mixture (if desired)

Method 

1. Grease and line a 27 x 18 cm slice pan and line bottom and sides with baking paper.
2. Pour the tap-water into a large, microwave-safe bowl (I used my big Pyrex bowl) and sprinkle half the gelatine quantity over the top, whisking in thoroughly with a fork. Repeat with the remaining half of the gelatine. The gelatine should break up and mostly dissolve. Stir in caster sugar.
3. Microwave for 5 minutes, stir with fork, then microwave again for 3 minutes.
4. Whisk in cornflour, icing sugar mixture and cream of tartar. Microwave for another 3 minutes.
5. Whisk in rosewater and red food colouring, allow mixture to cool for five minutes, then pour into prepared pan. Scrape any bubbles from the surface with a fork. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate overnight.
6. Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until melted and smooth. Spread chocolate over top of the Turkish delight with a spatula.
7. Refrigerate about 20 minutes before turning out of the pan onto a chopping board and cutting into squares (or funky shapes) with a big cook’s knife.
8. Straight before serving, roll squares in a small bowlful of icing sugar, if desired.

Tips

• Cooking times are based on my 1100 watt microwave.
• Leave plenty of baking paper overhanging to make it easy later to remove the Turkish delight from the pan and peel off the baking paper.
• From Step 5 onwards, I found it easier to use a proper whisk instead of the fork.
• At Step 5, it’s important to allow that 5 minutes of cooling time so that the baking paper doesn’t warp and buckle into the middle of your mixture. Try it and you’ll see what I mean!
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan – especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• Heating your knife will make it easier to cut the Turkish delight. Heat your knife by holding it under a (very) hot tap for a whole minute and drying it off quickly before cutting. If you have trouble with the chocolate shattering, try turning the Turkish delight upside-down to cut.

“*than the average of leading chocolate bars”

Reverse chocolate chip cookies

So I’ve just realised that I have a serious chocolate problem. One symptom: I believe I can “improve” every recipe by adding chocolate to it – well, every sweet recipe, anyway. And I’ve done it again!

These decadent little treats are a chocolate lover’s dream – a good dose of melted chocolate gleefully blended into a chewy cookie mixture, and plenty of white chocolate chips thrown in to give your teeth something exciting to hook into (and also provide a nicer visual than brown-on-brown).

My main piece of advice with chocolate chip cookies is to very carefully monitor the cooking time. Everyone’s oven works a little differently, so perhaps even do a few test runs of one or two cookies to find out what the ideal cooking time is in your oven. And it’s much better to take them out too early than leave them in too long. Who wants crunchy chocolate chips cookies? 

When you take them out of the oven, the cookies will be tall and puffy, and you might think they’re undercooked, but rest assured that they will collapse back into a normal cookie shape as they cool. Leave them to rest on the oven trays for a while, otherwise they will be far too floppy to transfer onto the wire racks.

Interesting fact: chocolate chip cookies were invented by a happy mistake! A cook named Ruth Wakefield was making cookies and, after running out of her usual ingredient (the exact ingredient varies depending on which version of this story you read), decided to use chopped up chocolate instead, thinking it would melt into the cookies as they cooked. Luckily, she was wrong, and so began the life of chocolate-chip cookies, which were initially named “toll house cookies” (after the name of Wakefield’s inn). It’s hard to believe this only happened about eighty years ago – can you imagine life without chocolate chip cookies?

Ingredients

120 g Nuttelex (see tips below for alternatives)

½ tsp vanilla extract

85 g brown sugar

85 g white sugar

½ large egg

190 g plain flour

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp cocoa powder

50 g dark chocolate Melts, roughly chopped

160 g white chocolate chips

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170°C and line baking trays with baking paper.
2. Melt the dark chocolate pieces in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring the bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until chocolate is melted and smooth.
3. Allow chocolate to cool while beating together Nuttelex, vanilla, sugars and egg with an electric mixer until light in colour and texture (see image below).
4. Scoop a cupful of the mixture into the melted dark chocolate and mix together with a spoon to bring down the temperature of the chocolate, before adding it to the rest of the mixture and mixing thoroughly until the colour is even.
5. Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder into a large bowl. Add half at a time to the mixture, mixing well after each.
6. Add white chocolate chips and mix lightly and briefly with the elective mixer or by hand.
7. Refrigerate 1 hour.
8. Roll mixture into 3 cm balls and place on the prepared baking trays approximately 3 cm apart from each other.
9. Bake cookies for 10 minutes. Cool on trays for about15 minutes or until cookies can be lifted across to wire racks without bending too much. Cool completely on wire racks.

Makes 25–30.

Step 3 – beat the mixture until it becomes light

Step 4 – add some of the mixture to the melted chocolate

Tips

• Nuttelex is a dairy-free table spread, which we used in my house while I was growing up. It’s an alternative to butter and margarine, and you can find it beside them in Australian supermarkets. I’ve also tried this recipe with unsalted butter and Meadow Lea (margarine), and they all work fine, but I love the Nuttelex ones best. Just use whatever you have in the fridge.
• If you don’t have white chocolate chips, it’s perfectly okay to simply chop up a white chocolate block, but make sure the pieces are the size of chocolate chips – because huge lumps of white chocolate don’t taste as nice in a cookie as huge chunks of real chocolate do.
• If you’re wondering why the ingredients list specifies half an egg, it’s because this recipe in its original form makes about 60 cookies from one egg. I crack one egg into a glass and whisk it well with a fork to combine the yolk and the white, then pour half of it into the mixture (very slowly and carefully or the entire egg will plop in all at once). I haven’t tried using an entire egg, but chances are it would work okay.
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• The mixture will be fine if left in the refrigerator for longer than an hour, but will become firmer the longer it’s in there.
• This recipe makes enough cookies to require three baking trays. Because I only have two, I put the cookie mixture back in the fridge while the first two trayfuls are cooking and cooling.