Apple
of my Eye
Hi! I’m Becky.
I live in the midwest with my husband and yorkie, Sophie. I love to cook, bake and do crafts, so
Pinterest has a wealth of ideas for me
to try. Sometimes they come out great,
other times we end up ordering pizza.
Fall is my
favorite season. I waste my entire
summer waiting for the cooler temperatures, fall leaves, and pumpkin
picking. It’s also the only season where
it’s socially acceptable to have my entire house smell like apples and cinnamon. Almost all of my favorite desserts involve
some sort of apples and cinnamon combo, so I tested out the baked apples pin
from http://skinnychef.com/recipes/baked-apples. If
it worked out well, it would be a healthy, delicious treat that I could make
easily, and it would make my house smell like fall. An added bonus: I already had all of the
ingredients except for the apples and apple juice, so it was a relatively inexpensive
test and I wouldn’t be out too much if it failed miserably (as many of my
experiments do).
I started out
by getting out all of my ingredients. The
recipe calls for Gala or Macintosh apples.
I chose Gala. I left out the
optional orange liquor.
I had forgotten
how hard it is to core apples. Maybe I
just don’t have very much upper body strength, but I had to really push to get
my corer through. The worst part was
that once I got the core out of the apple, it would get stuck in the corer and
I would have to pry it out with a spoon.
Someone should invent an apple corer-clearer outer. On the up side, Sophie created a new doggy
game called “how much apple can I eat off the floor before the woman can clean
it up?” so at least the floor was clean.
Once I got the
apples cored, it was time to fill them.
After figuring out that the best way to get the filling in was with my ½
teaspoon measuring spoon, it was pretty smooth.
If you have a baby spoon in the house, I bet that would work too. I don’t know if my apple corer makes exceptionally
large holes, but I definitely did not have enough filling from following the
recipe. The original amount of filling
only got me through four apples. I did
some quick math and make a half batch of filling to finish out the other two
apples. Brain to the rescue!
I put them in
the crockpot for 2.5 hours (the conservative end of what the recipe calls for)
and crossed my fingers.
Two and a half
hours later, my house smelled amazing.
Win! Then I looked at the
apples…and they looked nothing like I expected.
They were dark, shriveled, and barely had any filling left.
They tasted ok,
but kind of bland. And I like things
bland. We’re talking plain pasta, no
dressing on salad, no syrup on pancakes.
But these were too bland for me.
I did get some
amazing smelling liquid out of the crockpot, which I’ve pictured below. I’m not going to lie, I tasted it. It was greasy, but tasted amazing. I spooned some of it over the apples, and it
made them taste much better.
I would probably classify
this as a level 2 on the GCT Fail Scale.
It was ok- they’re edible. But
it’s definitely not as delicious as the description made it sound, and the
picture on the pin is definitely of the apples pre-baking when they still look
pretty. I think the biggest problem was
that when the butter and brown sugar melted, they just seeped out of the bottom
of the apples. If there was some way to
keep the filling in while it was cooking, I think it would soak into the apples
more and all of that flavor that ended up in the apple juice would be in the
apples instead.
I saw people commenting on
the original pin that they were considering using oatmeal instead of
walnuts. I wanted to follow the pin
exactly, but I wonder if oatmeal would hold the filling together better. The walnuts might not have been able to hold
it in the apple. If I try this again, I
might go that route and see what happens.
