Apple Pastries

I love food! I will try any type of food at least once. But my sweet tooth always dominates my savory tastebuds. Although I substitute fruit for pastries and store bought sweets. Whenever I want something sweet I usually grab a Macintosh apple or green grapes. Fruit has fructose which gives it the natrual sweetness, vitamins and minerals that’s good for your body. As opposed to processed sugar that can make me feel tired and bloated.

I can admit though that sometimes I buy way too much fruit that ends up going to waste. My solution to save the fruit is by baking a pastry or to make a smoothie. At the ripest point of a fruits lifespan is when it’s the sweetest so why throw it in the garbage when you can use it.

I have to confess between cooking and baking I only enjoy the latter. Perhaps it’s because baking requires precision and a timeline that cooking doesn’t. Cooking has a lot of possibilities of going wrong. You may think baking does as well but for me it’s the scorching water or burnt something or other that has made me ward off cooking unless I’m absolutely starving and there is not a quick solution. My patience runs thin when a pork chop has don’t been throughly cooked already or water isnt boiling fast enough. With baking I can combine the exact amount of ingredients, put it in the oven and let the timer do the work while I sit back and relax. And I always get a sweet reward in the end not a burnt or oversalted item.

Apples are what was recently getting over ripped in my pantry. Here is the recipe to the apple pastries I made. Now I love to bake but I am no baking champion therefore I used a recipe for the pastry dough here. The dough is the longest process in total taking me a day and a half to complete. The recipe has no pictures so use the ones below as a guide. http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017897-danish-dough

Pastry:Combine 

Your dough should not look perfect at all, it should look crumbly. Leaving big chunks of butter in the dough will give you a flaky pastry.

The process for the perfect dough took me a day and a half to finish. It’s a lot of work and takes time but in the end it pays off. A great tip is each time you roll out your dough flour your rolling pin and board so the pastry doesn’t get stuck and break. After the rolling and chilling process your dough should look like this in the end:

Filling:

I combined half a tablespoon of light brown sugar and cinnamon with the apples. This part of the recipe I did on instinct but if you think that’s too much I suggest a quarter tablespoon of each. You could always taste the apples before putting it in the pastry. If you would like the apples to remind you of the holidays you may want to add nutmeg. Although be less liberal as it is a strong seasoning. I left my apples big by preference but they can be cut smaller.

Roll out your pastry dough but don’t roll it out too much. You don’t want to be able to see through it. You want it thin enough to fold but thick enough that it won’t break at the folds.

Cut your dough into squares. I was able to cut out ten.

I put a tablespoon of the apples in the middle of the squares, stretching the dough with my hands until it wrapped around the apples

Beat one egg to give the pastries an egg wash with a pastry brush or slowly with a spoon. This is going to allow your pasty dough to have a golden color and shiny coat onced baked.

For preference I sprinkled cinnamon on top before baking. Too make sure nothing sticks and for easy clean up line your baking sheet with parchment paper and spray with non-stick cooking spray. 

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 min. Depending on your oven legthen or shorten the time.

YUM!

Let me know how yours came out! Or if you changed the recipe to fit a preference.

T.S.