I just did some delicious apples for board games’ night at my lovely friends’ place. The recipe is amazingly simple and practical given the extraordinary number of apples available up here in the north this time of the year. Also, it takes just 30-45 minutes for one round of baking.
There are many ways of doing these delicious apples with recipes all over the internet. I am just sharing here what I did to the apples to get this mouth-watering result:
Ingredients:
- 4 large good baking apples,
You can choose between Rome Beauty, Golden Delicious, or Jonagold (my choice here). - 2 + 1 tsp cinnamon powder,
- 4 tbsp of brown sugar,
- 4 tbsp unflavored butter,
- 4 tbsp chopped raisins, and
- 4 tbsp chopped pecans.
Recipe:
- Preheat oven to 357°F or 190°C.
- Wash the apples, and remove the core without cutting your apples into half. It’s a piece of cake if you have an apple corer. Otherwise, just take a regular knife and vertically carve out the core such that you don’t make a hole at the bottom. Clean the bottom (exterior of course). Use the tip of knife or spoon to remove the seeds, if the need be. The resultant holes should be 3/4 or an inch wide.
- Mix butter, sugar, pecans, raisins and cinnamon to prepare the filling. Don’t forget to put 1 tbsp butter and 1 tsp cinnamon powder aside.
- Stuff your apples with the filling, place equal chunks of butter on top of the fillings, and sprinkle the remaining cinnamon.
- Spread baking sheet on a baking try and place the prepared apples on it. Bake for 15-20 minutes while keeping an eye on the apples during last five minutes. We don’t want them to split and spread.
There are recipes which specify baking apples in a baking dish half filled with water for more than 30 minutes. I am not sure how that works as I have yet to try that approach.
It’s important to be careful with baking time and status of apples. I initially baked my apples for only 15 minutes, which should suffice. But, I have an electric oven with uneven heating issues which required me to bake the apples for additional 5-10 minutes. Although the extra baking minutes baked my apples completely, but they also yielded a mushy base. Generally, 15-25 minutes of baking should be enough.
These delicious baked apples are served best warm and with vanilla ice cream.
Health Check: There are 162-181 calories in a baked apple on average, with calorie breakdown as 1% fat, 98% carbs, and 1% protein.
Stay healthy! =)