RECIPE #8: Caramel Apple Cream Pie
Hey, hey! Summer's almost over, and despite its relative mildness, I for one will be glad to see it go. I don't know, I just don't like sweating when I haven't been doing anything. Hot, sunny weather usually makes me tired and cranky. We just had some crazy summer storms last week that busted tons of trees, shut down power all over the area and caused lots of flooding. My parents' basement got it, although they didn't tell me until days afterward. If you remember my grandma's gorgeous blue sectional, or the tropical fountain that served as the centerpiece of the Flaming Cave Lounge (RIP), or the spare mattresses I was counting on, or the big video standee for "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" that I begged off the owner of Video USA when I was 12, know that they are all gone. I know, that's not really summer's fault, but it doesn't exactly flood in winter, does it?
On the plus side, I have August's recipe report ready earlier than I did the last few. This wasn't a tough decision: I decided I would make my own birthday dessert this year. Cake is real nice as a tradition, but I prefer pie. I can't think of a type of pie I don't like. Mincemeat, Key lime, coconut cream, Shepherd's, turkey pot, Frito... it don't matter, I'll eat that shit. When I mentioned my idea to my Sassy Frassy Lassie, she whipped out a book entitled "The Best of Country Cooking 1999." Scanning the pie pages, it wasn't long before I came across a recipe which sounded too good to pass up. My favorite Baker's Square pie is the French Apple Cream Cheese, and this one sounded close to that decadent delight.
A further note about the recipe: Sassy Frass' cookbook is compiled from recipes sent in to magazines. Each one tells you who takes credit for the dish and allows them a few lines for a personal anecdote. This Caramel Apple Cream Pie comes from one Lisa DiNuccio of Boxford, Massachusetts, who tells us."When I first made this pie for my family, the reactions weren't real words - they were more 'Ooh!' and 'Mmm!'" She claims it won third prize at a local fair, and third place seemed like a reasonable aspiration. This was my birthday pie.
I began by peeling and chopping up four medium-sized Granny Smith apples - or what I believed to be medium-sized, anyway. Ultimately, there was too much apple filling to fit in the pie, so I probably should have gotten smaller apples. I do have leftover filling which I intend to dump on some waffles this week, so it's not a problem. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to back up and tell you that it took me forever to chop these suckers. There has to be an easy way to cut oddly-shaped food into similar chunks, but I have yet to master it.
Anyway, much later, I had a lot of apple pieces. 1/4 cup of butter and 1/2 cup of packed dark brown sugar melted together in the skillet, becoming a thick paste. Into this went all the apple chunks and 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice. When I was looking for this last ingredient at the store, I saw two different combinations. They both contained cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and cloves, but the Spice Islands brand included mace, whereas the McCormick one did not. Not knowing what mace was, I grabbed the Spice Islands because, hey, an extra spice is an extra spice. Turns out mace is derived from the same plant as nutmeg, and has a similar if milder flavor. Rad!
The apple mixture simmered for 15 minutes on medium heat, and I stirred it every couple of minutes. At the end, I mixed in two tablespoons of flour and stirred for a minute before removing it from the heat. Next, I prepared the crust. My original intention was to make a crust from scratch, but time was short, and the recipe does call for a pre-made 9-inch pastry shell. I went with a graham cracker crust purportedly made by elves in a rustic tree factory. This didn't require any baking prior to filling, which also saved some time. I drizzled 1/2 cup of caramel ice cream topping and 1/2 cup of chopped pecans (you'll remember those from June's muffins) over the crust before spooning in apple mixture until it was about 3/4 full.
Next came the top layer. I beat an 8 oz. package of cream cheese, 1/4 cup of sugar, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract while I heated the oven to 350 degrees. My arm was tired, but the mixture was smooth by the time the oven was ready. It poured easily over the apples, filling the crust all the way to the top. The recipe says to bake the pie for 35 to 45 minutes, but it was actually about 50 minutes by the time I could insert a toothpick without pulling up a big hunk of the cream cheese layer. I'm glad I didn't use a knife to check this as the book suggests, because I managed to mangle the top pretty good with a smaller tool anyway.
After it cooled a bit on a wire rack, I added my own final touch. The original recipe calls for serving the pie with whipped topping and a sprinkle of pumpkin pie spice. I kept the spices, but not being a big whipped topping guy, I instead improvised a little design with caramel topping. Glad to have the thing done, I rushed this; if I had waited until the pie cooled a little more, I would not have needed to wipe up so much caramel from my counter. Ah, well.
Sure, the final result did not look as nice as what you'd get at Bakers Square (see above). Sure, a homemade crust probably would have been even better. Sure, I made it to serve at my birthday party on Saturday, then waited until enough people showed up, then waited until the crowd thinned so I wouldn't gyp anyone, then got too drunk to care and ended up trying it with Sassy Frass Sunday morning. The point is, this is a fine pie. Every bite had something awesome in it, and I now have a foolproof method of concocting my own apple pie filling. Hats off to Ms. DiNuccio. This should have at least come in second.
New CD reviews (HORSE the band, Stereo Total) are here. Finally, here's the best fan-made teaser trailer for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" that I have yet to see. I believe the footage was nicked from "From Hell." It's only a matter of time before we have real "Todd" footage to drool over... although we probably won't get any gore, not even in the film itself. Yeah, like a Sondheim musical's gonna bring the kids running if it simply skips the gushing carotids.
On the plus side, I have August's recipe report ready earlier than I did the last few. This wasn't a tough decision: I decided I would make my own birthday dessert this year. Cake is real nice as a tradition, but I prefer pie. I can't think of a type of pie I don't like. Mincemeat, Key lime, coconut cream, Shepherd's, turkey pot, Frito... it don't matter, I'll eat that shit. When I mentioned my idea to my Sassy Frassy Lassie, she whipped out a book entitled "The Best of Country Cooking 1999." Scanning the pie pages, it wasn't long before I came across a recipe which sounded too good to pass up. My favorite Baker's Square pie is the French Apple Cream Cheese, and this one sounded close to that decadent delight.
A further note about the recipe: Sassy Frass' cookbook is compiled from recipes sent in to magazines. Each one tells you who takes credit for the dish and allows them a few lines for a personal anecdote. This Caramel Apple Cream Pie comes from one Lisa DiNuccio of Boxford, Massachusetts, who tells us."When I first made this pie for my family, the reactions weren't real words - they were more 'Ooh!' and 'Mmm!'" She claims it won third prize at a local fair, and third place seemed like a reasonable aspiration. This was my birthday pie.
I began by peeling and chopping up four medium-sized Granny Smith apples - or what I believed to be medium-sized, anyway. Ultimately, there was too much apple filling to fit in the pie, so I probably should have gotten smaller apples. I do have leftover filling which I intend to dump on some waffles this week, so it's not a problem. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to back up and tell you that it took me forever to chop these suckers. There has to be an easy way to cut oddly-shaped food into similar chunks, but I have yet to master it.Anyway, much later, I had a lot of apple pieces. 1/4 cup of butter and 1/2 cup of packed dark brown sugar melted together in the skillet, becoming a thick paste. Into this went all the apple chunks and 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice. When I was looking for this last ingredient at the store, I saw two different combinations. They both contained cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and cloves, but the Spice Islands brand included mace, whereas the McCormick one did not. Not knowing what mace was, I grabbed the Spice Islands because, hey, an extra spice is an extra spice. Turns out mace is derived from the same plant as nutmeg, and has a similar if milder flavor. Rad!
The apple mixture simmered for 15 minutes on medium heat, and I stirred it every couple of minutes. At the end, I mixed in two tablespoons of flour and stirred for a minute before removing it from the heat. Next, I prepared the crust. My original intention was to make a crust from scratch, but time was short, and the recipe does call for a pre-made 9-inch pastry shell. I went with a graham cracker crust purportedly made by elves in a rustic tree factory. This didn't require any baking prior to filling, which also saved some time. I drizzled 1/2 cup of caramel ice cream topping and 1/2 cup of chopped pecans (you'll remember those from June's muffins) over the crust before spooning in apple mixture until it was about 3/4 full.
Next came the top layer. I beat an 8 oz. package of cream cheese, 1/4 cup of sugar, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract while I heated the oven to 350 degrees. My arm was tired, but the mixture was smooth by the time the oven was ready. It poured easily over the apples, filling the crust all the way to the top. The recipe says to bake the pie for 35 to 45 minutes, but it was actually about 50 minutes by the time I could insert a toothpick without pulling up a big hunk of the cream cheese layer. I'm glad I didn't use a knife to check this as the book suggests, because I managed to mangle the top pretty good with a smaller tool anyway.After it cooled a bit on a wire rack, I added my own final touch. The original recipe calls for serving the pie with whipped topping and a sprinkle of pumpkin pie spice. I kept the spices, but not being a big whipped topping guy, I instead improvised a little design with caramel topping. Glad to have the thing done, I rushed this; if I had waited until the pie cooled a little more, I would not have needed to wipe up so much caramel from my counter. Ah, well.
Sure, the final result did not look as nice as what you'd get at Bakers Square (see above). Sure, a homemade crust probably would have been even better. Sure, I made it to serve at my birthday party on Saturday, then waited until enough people showed up, then waited until the crowd thinned so I wouldn't gyp anyone, then got too drunk to care and ended up trying it with Sassy Frass Sunday morning. The point is, this is a fine pie. Every bite had something awesome in it, and I now have a foolproof method of concocting my own apple pie filling. Hats off to Ms. DiNuccio. This should have at least come in second.New CD reviews (HORSE the band, Stereo Total) are here. Finally, here's the best fan-made teaser trailer for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" that I have yet to see. I believe the footage was nicked from "From Hell." It's only a matter of time before we have real "Todd" footage to drool over... although we probably won't get any gore, not even in the film itself. Yeah, like a Sondheim musical's gonna bring the kids running if it simply skips the gushing carotids.
posted by SoulReaper at 10:15 AM
1 Comments:
HORSE the band, A Natural Death (Combat/Koch)
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From the spacy "Lolita Fantôme" to the swinging "Relax Baby Be Cool," Cactus has a perfect voice for this, somewhere between cutesy and snotty. She bops along with "Baisers del l'Enfer de la Musique," sounding pleasant enough peppering her French with names of American rock icons, but when she slips in a jubilant "I wanna be by you!" it's simply adorable.
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Paris <-> Berlin touches on new wave, classic punk, electro, disco and chanson without leaning too heavily in one direction, and Cactus and Göring sing in French, German and English. If you threw it on at a party, your guests might be forgiven for assuming you're listening to several albums on shuffle. Those who embrace Euroculture that's diverse - and just a bit twee - should enjoy the effect.
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