Apple of My Eye

In the blink of an eye, the curtain has closed on autumn. But I’m not ready to let go of fall just yet. It’s my favorite time of the year, and the season plays host to many classic pie flavors—apple, pumpkin, pecan, sweet potato. As a twist, our pie for this month isn’t actually a pie at all, although the recipe does call for pie crust. This month we’re turning to page 190 in the Farm Journal Pie Cookbook to make Apple Dumplings De Luxe! What’s the de luxe part? You’ll just have to read and find out!

Baking Up Memories

Between the sugar and the bright red and green apples, this month’s recipe has me reminiscing about Halloween. When I was a kid, I loved picking out my costume every year. I always opted for something frilly—fairy, princess, fairy-princess—never anything scary. And of course I loved the candy. One of the best parts of the night was dumping my plastic pumpkin bucket out on the floor and sorting my spoils. For me, the more peanut butter cups, the better. 

Now that I’m older, I think I like Halloween even more than I did as a kid. As I was growing out of trick-or-treating, I was growing into a love for Gothic Horror and anything Victorian and macabre. If I were to have another chance at trick-or-treating, I might very well dress as the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, or Tippi Hedren’s character in The Birds. 

Unlike me, my grandmother always loved the spooky side of Halloween. Towards the end of her life, she told me about how as a teenager, local shops used to hire her during Halloween and Christmas to paint festive scenes on their windows. 

When I was growing up, my grandparents didn’t get a ton of trick-or-treaters on their street, but they still bought candy for the few kids who came to their door. I remember one year when I was in middle school, my grandparents had some leftover mini Snickers, and Twix bars, and Milky Ways. I can still picture them clustered at the bottom of a brown ceramic bowl. It was an afternoon in early November. My grandmother and I were sitting in the family room deciding what to do to entertain ourselves. I don’t remember how or why it started, but for one reason or another, we decided to put those leftover candies to work. It started as a challenge—each of us had a bowl with a few mini chocolates. One at a time, we would toss the chocolates back and forth and attempt to catch them in our bowls. The challenge soon intensified, we began tossing them from farther away, sometimes two at a time. Soon the entire thing devolved into a chocolate battle, my grandmother and I each hiding behind furniture on opposite sides of the room, trying to toss and catch candies as fast as we could, paying little attention to aim, and laughing till we were out of breath. Halloween leftovers have never been so sweet.

The Result

If you’ve never had an apple dumpling, let me introduce you. To make an apple dumpling, you must first peel and core an apple. The cavity inside is filled with brown sugar and butter. Then the entire apple is wrapped in pie dough and baked and basted with syrup made of sugar, butter, hot water, and lemon juice. 

Sounds good as is, right? Well, according to Farm Journal, you can turn any plain old apple dumpling into a de luxe dumpling with just a few simple changes. Instead of filling the apple cavity with butter and brown sugar, you make a paste out of the sugar and butter, and rub it on the outside of the apples before wrapping them in dough. The empty cavity is instead filled with marmalade. For the syrup that gets poured over the wrapped dumplings, you omit the butter, and exchange lemon juice for any fruit juice of your choosing. For my de luxe dumplings I made a basting syrup with fresh orange juice, and traded the marmalade for apricot jam. (My husband and I are big apricot lovers!) 

Although I loved the idea of the jam, and it was very pretty to cut into the dumpling and see that rush of gold apricot flow out of the apple, ultimately I found this recipe to be too sweet. This may have been my own fault. Marmalade has a little bitterness in it from the orange peel, and perhaps that might have cut some of the sweetness in the dumpling. But still, between the brown sugar paste and the sugar syrup, I don’t think the jam added much to the overall dish. In the future, I will probably skip the jam and fill the cavities with the typical brown sugar and butter. Although I think adding a little something else to that mixture for texture might be nice. Maybe toasted pecans or chopped dried fruit (like raisins or apricots) reconstituted in a little hot water. I think any of those three would add flavor, without adding extra sweetness.

Now, when it comes to the wrapping of the apples, that’s another story entirely. If you’ve ever been responsible for wrapping a round or cylindrical gift, then you know exactly how this goes. The wrapping paper (or pie crust in this case) just wanted to bunch, not fold neatly. I thought this was going to result in a lumpy, ugly dumpling, but to my surprise, once I muscled the dough into place, it was pretty easy to smooth out any lumps. To hide the seams at the top of each apple, I cut a heart and two leaves out of dough. Voila! A cute apple dumpling. 

I will absolutely make these again. But next time, I’ll do some experimenting and find my own way to make these dumplings de luxe!