Now prepare yourself for a taste buds blowing experience, because this will be the best apple pie you’ve eaten (and ever will) in your entire life 🙂 This recipe comes from popular polish food blog called Kwestia smaku, I just slightly modified it ( i.e. skipped raisins, which appear in original recipe with apples, which of course you can add if you’re big fan).
I don’t know where the deliciousness of this cake lies, but I suspect it might be in the pan fried apple filling, which makes it juicy, aromatic and soft, and a spot on apple filling is crucial for our pie to be a success.
I sometimes had pies with sort of cold raw apples and it ruins everything, even the classic method of baking the whole pie with the filling, but not preparing and frying apples beforehand won’t give you the same results as this one.
I must say we made this pie probably around 10 times just in a first couple of months of my maternity leave. I had enormous sugar cravings and this thing I could eat for breakfast, dinner and supper, in fact, I could manage the entire pie in one go (well I didn’t actually do it thank godness, but I could 🙂
So enough advertising, let’s get to work 🙂
Ingredients
For the pastry
3 glasses of flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 glass of caster sugar
1 sachet of vanilla sugar (if you can’t get hold of it, just add some vanilla pod)
250 g of unsalted butter
4 eggs
Apples
2 kg of apples
12 teaspoons of sugar
1 sachet of vanilla sugar (or vanilla pod)
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
Method
Peel apples and cut them in small pieces, add regular sugar, vanilla sugar and cinnamon, and fry it in a pan until soft and juicy (and smelling gorgeous) for 5 – 10 minutes. Leave it to cool.
Sieve flour and baking powder into a bowl, add 3/4 glass of sugar, vanilla sugar and roughly chopped butter, then add 3 yolks and 1 whole egg. Now work the dough into a ball, then half it and wrap separately in cling film, and chill for 1 hour.
Place one of your dough ball into lined and greased baking tin (approx. 20×30 cm), and work it with your fingers to fill the tray, it will be the bottom layer, you can use rolling pin if you prefer. Put it back in the fridge.
Beat 3 egg whites, add the remaining 1/4 glass of sugar spoon by spoon while still beating, until it’s shiny and stiff.
Preheat oven to 175 °C, roll your second part of dough into a rectangle the same size as the first one. Place apples over the bottom layer, spread eggs and sugar foam over it, and cover with top layer of dough.
Bake for 1 hour, if the top starts to get too brown, just cover with tin foil. Let it cool off completely and sprinkle with icing sugar for fairy tale look.
Long and cold months are just round the corner and I can’t think of a better way to face them than wrapped in a blanket with a warm apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream, watching my favourite tv show (although breastfeeding and maternity leave are over, so don’t really have excuse to do it as often as I want! 🙂
What remains 