If you like the crisp edges of lasagne, the soaked croutons, the whipped cream that gets icy around the chocolate scoop - you’re in the right place.
Good morning!
Today’s school drop-off took twice as long as usual because every pile of leaves we passed had to be picked up and thrown in the air. These apples—slowly roasted in a pint of cider with fresh ginger, anise, and cinnamon—are my grown-up equivalent of dancing under falling leaves and stomping on the crunchy ones.
I love baking with apples. I make daytime apple cakes—squidgy, tart, buckwheat ones, and fragrant apple and rosemary loaves—and warm, caramel-ly after-dinner apple desserts, too. Cider-Roasted Apples fall in the latter category—they’re something to eat with vanilla ice cream and friends. They give all the fall joy you’d get from pie or tarte tatin, but they take about 5 minutes to prepare.
Cider-Roasted Apples
These sauce-soft apples, barely held in shape by their candied skin, are effortless and sexy. Rolled in butter and brown sugar, they become pudding-like in a pool of spiced caramel that makes itself in the pan as a pint of cider reduces with ginger, cinnamon, and star anise. A spoonful leaves behind a tingle.
You could use another kind of booze—whiskey, Armagnac, amaretto—or replace the spices with whatever you have in the cupboard—a vanilla pod, a clove—just be sure to cook the apples for the full 90 minutes and reduce the sauce on the stove a bit before eating it hot with vanilla ice cream.
Serves 6
6 Honeycrisp apples or other medium eating variety
6 tablespoons, 85 grams, unsalted butter at room temperature
¾ cup, 150 grams, light brown sugar
1 pint, 550 milliliters, cider (the alcoholic kind)
4 inch piece of fresh ginger, sliced
1 stick cinnamon
1 piece star anise
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
Heat the oven to 425 Fahrenheit, 220 Celsius. Gently score the apples around their equators with a knife to allow steam to escape (this prevents them from popping).
Place the apples in a 12-inch pan, smudge the soft butter all over each apple, then roll them in the brown sugar. Pour in the cider, and add the ginger, cinnamon and star anise.
Bake for 90 minutes, basting once or twice if you think of it. When you can poke a fork to the core of the apples and detect nothing but soft sauce within, remove the pan from the oven and place it over low heat on the stove. Add the apple cider vinegar to the pan and simmer until the sauce reduces to the consistency of maple syrup, about 10 minutes. Serve each apple in a bowl with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and pour the cider caramel over the top.
I bet they smell heavenly when baking…
Looking forward to this. And also looking forward to that buckwheat apple cake you mentioned. ☺️