Apple Day

          A visit to my old stomping grounds in Saratoga Springs this week. It was refreshing to see that everything is still so green in upper state New York. Cape Cod, having been entirely to the East of Hurricane Irene, was wind-whipped badly, and without any rain, all the salt blown off the ocean severely burned our trees, crippling many of the leaves prematurely. Saratoga, however, on the western side of the storm, got an overwhelming amount of precipitation, leaving the town with one final, lush, bloom as Fall approaches. I felt I really needed to take advantage of scenery, so Zach and I went apple picking. And the haul was beautiful. Macs, Empires, Crispins, and we think some Honey Crisps and Macouns as well, but to be honest, the trees were not all marked and our taste-test apple identification strategies could have had some fault. What we definitely found a lot of was some good, old-fashioned, Fall fun. And there was cider and a cider donut too, of course. And then there was applesauce, apple tart, and upside down apple cupcakes.

 Haul.

Picking.

Beautiful sweet peppers for sale at the Saratoga Apple Farm Stand.

 Ready for picking, come and get 'em!

Show off.

Apple cider donut to go. It's amazing, by the way, that it lasted long enough to be photographed.

        

          The apple tart we baked came straight from Smitten Kitchen's "simplest apple tart recipe," which came from Alice Waters' cookbook. We did make a few small adjustments and tweaks, because, well, I guess we really just can't help ourselves; we love to improvise. First of all, we made the crust whole wheat, which was a great success, and since our tart pan was actually a handmade pie plate furnished by Mill Stone Pottery (nepotism, yes, but merited) it was more of a deep-dish, open-faced pie. Still, delicious. And my favorite part about the recipe is that the cores and peels are not simply thrown away, but stuffed in a stock pot with some sugar and water, and simmered and reduced into a syrup to top the tart.

Simple Apple Tart (from Smitten Kitchen, and Alice Waters, and our own inability to follow a recipe precisely)

Dough:

1 cup mostly whole wheat flour with a smidge of all purpose white flour thrown in there for the sake of elasticity.

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, just softened and cut into 1/2 inch pieces

4 tablespoons chilled water

Mix the flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Add 2 tablespoons of the butter and cut into the flour using a fork, knife, pastry cutter, or your fingers, until the dough is somewhat coarsely mixed. Add the remaining butter and mix with this same technique until well mixed, but still a bit course, with the largest chunks no bigger than peas. Then, drizzle in water slowly, mixing the dough constantly, until it all just holds together. It will appear to still have some dry patches. Continue to mix the dough with your fingers until you can roll it into a ball. Flatten it into a thick disk and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Remove from fridge, on a sheet of saran wrap, roll the dough into a 14-inch circle (or as big as you can go without making the crust too thin; whole wheat doesn't stretch quite the same as all-purpose flour). 

Using the saran wrap, easily transfer the rolled-out crust to your already greased 9 inch pan. Flatten into the bottom of the pan. Fill the crust with your prepared apples.

Apple Filling:

Roughly 2lbs of apples, peeled, cored, and sliced thinly

2 tablespoons melted butter

3 tablespoons of sugar

A dash of cinnamon

A sprinkle of cardamon

Core, peel, and thinly slice the apples. (Yes, we had a ton of fun with this machine...)

Toss the apples in a bowl with 1 tablespoon of the melted butter, cinnamon, and cardamon. Lay them out in a circular patter in the prepared crust. Sprinkle with remaining butter and sugar.

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes, rotating the pan every 15 minutes for even browning. When it's done, sprinkle with the glaze before serving.

Glaze:

All the cores and peels from the apples

1/2 cup sugar

Enough water to just cover the cores and peels in the stockpot.

Simmer the apple castings, sugar, and water for roughly 25 minutes. Strain the juice, discard the peels and cores (in the compost, because you have one, because it's the right thing to do) and simmer a bit more to reduce and thicken the glaze.

Pour over the tart, or anything else you want to taste sweet, apply, delicious.

           Here's the thing about the upside-down apple cupcakes: we have no idea how we made them. They are loosely based on a recipe from the Barefoot Contessa, but then we turned the recipe into a cupcake recipe, and then we realized after having scooped the batter into half of the cups that there simply wasn't going to be enough batter to go around, so then we just kind of fudged proportions to mix up a little more. The result was, of course, delicious, but the recipe is, apparently, going to be a well-kept secret. We know it went something like this...

Apple Upside-Down Cupcakes

Ingredients included, in no specific proportions that we can remember:
butter
apples, peeled, cored and sliced
sugar
apple cider
eggs
greek yogurt
lemon juice
vanilla extract
all-purpose flour
baking powder
salt
powdered sugar

We prepped the apples. We placed them in the bottom of cupcake pans. We poured in a bit of reduced sugar and apple cider. 

We topped each prepared cup with a dollop of the batter. Well, we topped half of the cupcake cups with batter, then we ran out, made some more, and finished filling the rest of them.

We definitely baked the cakes in a 350 degree oven, possibly for 15 minutes. We tried to flip the cakes directly out of the pans, realized that was a mistake, and then let them cool slightly before extracting them and cooling them fully, apple-side-up. 

We sprinkled the cakes with powdered sugar and ate them. Happily.