Hello!
Great to have you back here reading again (or if it's your first time here, my warm welcome to you 😊 ). It has been ages, right before our last post though, I so agree. (We started composing this one before the previous one.) Forgive the unintentional suspense once more; I hope our subsequent posts will be compensatory enough.
This was our first bake off. Don't have pictures from our second. #sadface
When we had our last bake off in February right before I left SA, I promised Doro my next post would be about our famous apple pie. We're in May, and a whole lot has happened since then. But jDoro, I never forgot my promise. So I specially dedicate this post to my biggest apple pie enthusiast, *drumroll* Doro!!!
As usual, I'll share the links to the recipes I used and then my hacks. A gentle reminder to us all, I'm a proud newbie to this baking stuff and love to try new things. Aside helping my mum before she stopped baking when I was much younger and a few baking episodes with friends, I'm as new as it gets. So I'm absolutely glad you're reading and hopefully baking with us. But I digress again, back to the apple pie...
So our apple pie recipe is a bit funny 'cos we got our perfect combo from different sites. Plus they're different little stories that go with it... including our almost messed up crust which I talk about a bit in the Crust section below. And my all time favourite jist: that no one really wanted to work on it during our first bake off but it actually became the favourite baked treat we had that day... lol... So Doro eventually did most of the work that day, I must say. It's a lot of work, especially peeling all those apples but surely awesomely rewarding when it's out of the oven. #allsmiles
And we followed the following steps:
Great to have you back here reading again (or if it's your first time here, my warm welcome to you 😊 ). It has been ages, right before our last post though, I so agree. (We started composing this one before the previous one.) Forgive the unintentional suspense once more; I hope our subsequent posts will be compensatory enough.
When we had our last bake off in February right before I left SA, I promised Doro my next post would be about our famous apple pie. We're in May, and a whole lot has happened since then. But jDoro, I never forgot my promise. So I specially dedicate this post to my biggest apple pie enthusiast, *drumroll* Doro!!!
Doro's on the far left, and I'm second from the right
As usual, I'll share the links to the recipes I used and then my hacks. A gentle reminder to us all, I'm a proud newbie to this baking stuff and love to try new things. Aside helping my mum before she stopped baking when I was much younger and a few baking episodes with friends, I'm as new as it gets. So I'm absolutely glad you're reading and hopefully baking with us. But I digress again, back to the apple pie...
So our apple pie recipe is a bit funny 'cos we got our perfect combo from different sites. Plus they're different little stories that go with it... including our almost messed up crust which I talk about a bit in the Crust section below. And my all time favourite jist: that no one really wanted to work on it during our first bake off but it actually became the favourite baked treat we had that day... lol... So Doro eventually did most of the work that day, I must say. It's a lot of work, especially peeling all those apples but surely awesomely rewarding when it's out of the oven. #allsmiles
The Filling
We got the filling ingredients from this Betty Crocker page. To be absolutely honest, we simply enjoyed the extra Zang we got from adding lemon juice, and because that made our filling a bit runny, this is how we changed the ingredients:- 1/2 cup of All purpose flour
- 4 tablespoons of butter
- 1/4 - 1/2 cup of Lemon Juice
- Peeled and cored the apples, and then cut them in 8 or 12 segments depending on the size of each apple (that's half of each quarter or a third of each quarter)
- We melted the butter and the sugar in a pan at high heat and stirred till we noticed a consistent mixture
- Added the apples at this point
- Then added the flour
- And then finished off with the lemon juice.
The trick is to make the filling taste very Zangy whilst on the stove because it tastes less acidic when it cools off and loses more Zang in its taste when the baking is done.
The Crust
Whilst the filling cooled off we made the crust from scratch using this recipe from this SimpleBites page. I must confess when we began to make the dough in our very first Bake Off, we did not estimate we needed freezing. I think because we ignored that instruction, our dough began to 'melt' after a while. So after working the dough according to the other steps, we added another cup of flour when we were rolling it out before lining our baking moulds. We kept sprinkling the flour bit by bit on our rolling surface till the dough absorbed it all and it felt firmer.
With our baking moulds lined with the dough, we distributed our filling and created incisions on the coverings. These incisions were made so there would be space for the pie to let out steam. So definitely, tarts and meshed coverings didn't need them. If there's no room for the pie to breathe, depending on how much space your filling takes up, you could have a messy pie from the filling bursting/oozing out from any weak portions of the crust.
We popped our pies in the preheated oven and let it bake for 30mins at 180°C. Basically we were cooking the dough since the filling was well done. And voila! Our lovely Apple pies were ready!
Lovely, warm, sweet, beautifully zangy, and a pleasant crust, a bon appetit to you when you finally try it out. And a special thanks to Doro, without you, this post may not have seen the light of day (especially since it took me about a month to finally complete it.... lol)
With our baking moulds lined with the dough, we distributed our filling and created incisions on the coverings. These incisions were made so there would be space for the pie to let out steam. So definitely, tarts and meshed coverings didn't need them. If there's no room for the pie to breathe, depending on how much space your filling takes up, you could have a messy pie from the filling bursting/oozing out from any weak portions of the crust.
We popped our pies in the preheated oven and let it bake for 30mins at 180°C. Basically we were cooking the dough since the filling was well done. And voila! Our lovely Apple pies were ready!
Lovely, warm, sweet, beautifully zangy, and a pleasant crust, a bon appetit to you when you finally try it out. And a special thanks to Doro, without you, this post may not have seen the light of day (especially since it took me about a month to finally complete it.... lol)
I hope once more you enjoyed my hacks and they are useful to your baking experience... and make you feel like a baking champion when you get all those compliments!!!
For the day you bake again (or for the first time), we, at Ndudu tales, wish you a Happy Baking Experience!
If you enjoyed reading this post at Ndudu tales or simply learnt something new, please share it with others. And do let us know what you think in the comments below. Thank you.
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