Old Fashioned Apple Dumplings

writ­ten 10/15/2023

What

Old-Fash­ioned Apple Dumplings: Peeled and Cored apples wrapped in dough and baked

Ingredients

Main: Apples, Brown Sug­ar, Gran­u­lat­ed Sug­ar, Apple Pie Sea­son­ings (cin­na­mon, nut­meg, all­spice, or what­ev­er you’d like), But­ter (reg­u­lar or veg­an), Dough (hand­made or bought pie crust), water/apple juice

Sup­plies: Peel­er, Cor­er, Bak­ing Dish, Roller, Work Sur­face, Saucepan, Bast­ing Brush

Option­al: Ice Cream

Time

1 hour (peel, core, roll, wrap, and make sauce) + 1 hour (bake) = 2 hours Total

Making

• Choose your apples
• Peel and core them
• Pre­heat the oven to 375F (190C)
• Acquire and roll out the dough (whether you make it or buy pie crust)
• Place the apple in the mid­dle, and then cut a rough­ly cross shape
• Using a 2:1 Brown Sug­ar to White Sug­ar mix + apple pie spices, put a bit inside the cored-out area, plus a dol­lop of but­ter (I topped mine off with some more sug­ar)
• Add some around the base of the apple
• Wet­ting the pieces so they stick (I used apple juice), wrap the apple up
• If you’d like, this is where you can get cre­ative with hid­ing the seams or using them to your dec­o­ra­tive advan­tage (I used some dough to make fun shapes)
• Put apples on a bak­ing dish
• In the saucepan, add but­ter + brown sug­ar + apple juice (I used the apple juice from wet­ting the dough and the sug­ar mix­ture)
• Stir it fre­quent­ly until it becomes a syrupy sauce
• Using a bast­ing brush, brush it onto the sur­face of the apples
• Bake for 50–55 min­utes
• Take it out, and use remain­ing sauce to drizzle/brush over­top

EAT with ice cream

Notes

I had to bake mine for 1 hour and 30 min­utes because I made the mis­take of using ALL of the sauce over­top the apples which then cre­at­ed a pool at the bot­tom of the dish. AVOID THIS. I spec­u­late that’s why it took so long to bake. That’s why I rec­om­mend just brush­ing it over­top and not pour­ing over the top like most recipes call for

Over­bak­ing caus­es the apples to dry out and the tops to get super hard espe­cial­ly with the sauce over top

If you don’t like crust (like me), make that dough THIN

I don’t think I’d do this again, instead opt­ing for cut apples in a bak­ing dish and a lay­er of dough over­top that with fun shapes. I’m not a mas­sive fan of crust

If I were to do it again, though, I’d roll the crust thin­ner, and maybe add some liq­uid to the inside of the apple (con­tem­plate leav­ing the bot­tom of the apple or mak­ing the crust thick­er there). It just felt dry even if I did over­bake it

Be care­ful of the seams that will bust open and release any sauce inside