"Do something with these apples or my mum will cry..."

...was roughly what my flatmate's girlfriend said to me upon returning from Somerset with these beauties from her mum's apple trees:

I don't think that you can really appreciate from this photo the sheer volume of apple that is sitting on that plate.  Each apple weighed about half a kilo, which is really quite a lot for a fruit that we usually view as a snack.

Needless to say, these are not snacking apples, these are cooking apples, so you really have to do something exciting with them with a fair amount of sugar to make them edible rather than mouth-puckeringly sour.  I like a challenge though and so I did what I always do when given half a chance - make myself a cup of tea, get into bed and leaf through these:

This picture makes me very happy.  Just look at all the exciting edible possibilities sitting there, in book form, just waiting to be uncovered and played with.  And it has a cup of tea in it.  Yum.

Anyway, enough looking at food porn, let's get amateur and make some.

The first thing that I made was something rather festive.  Brace yourself, dear reader, I'm going to mention Christmas.  Usually I try to avoid talking about Christmas plans and Christmassy things until December, but when one has a batch of apples about to go mouldy and make a woman in Somerset cry, the nettle/holly must be grasped and wrapped in tinsel.  Or something.  So I made a pan of this gorgeous stuff:

Mmm, mincemeat.  I cannot even begin to tell you how many people are confused by the word 'mincemeat'.  I honestly thought that everyone knew that in no way, shape or form does this include meat.  To be fair though, it used to, but way back in Tudor times when they added spices and so forth to finely chopped meat to try and disguise the fact that it was going a bit gross.  They were still doing it in Victorian times, but they were also still sending children up chimneys, being shocked by a flash of ankle and using leeches and I think it's fair to say that we've all moved on from that.

So, to be clear, no meat.  None.  Zero.  Not even suet.  That's what the apples are for, to create the moistness that suet usually gives to mincemeat.

That used up quite a lot of the apples, which was pretty good.  I took a picture of the jars, but to be honest, it just looks like jars of brown gunk, it's really not particularly thrilling.  I'll show you a picture of the pies in December, that will be much more exciting, but for now, just forget this ever happened.  Christmas?  What Christmas?

I have been craving a baked apple since September and as I have a rule that if I have a craving for something for more than an hour, I should probably eat it, I reckon two months is definitely long enough to warrant making a baked apple.  This was rather an odd craving, as I don't think that I had had a baked apple in at least ten years, so it was perfectly possible that I had just made up what I thought they tasted like.  I kind of had, to be honest, but I was not disappointed.  I adapted a Diana Henry recipe from 'Cook Simple', which is an awesome book - most of the recipes involve a bit of chopping, chucking stuff in a dish and shoving it in the oven, resulting in absolutely delicious yumminess.  More from her in other posts, I reckon...

Anyway, it was supposed to have raisins, dried cranberries, fresh cranberries, pecans, maple syrup and apple juice in it, but I didn't have most of that, so I just cored the apples (without a corer, how retro) and stuffed them with raisins, dried cranberries, almonds and maple syrup:

I put the 'lids' back on the apples, whacked them in the oven and when they were cooked, poured double cream on them:

These were then eaten sitting up in bed watching a film.  Can you think of a better way to spend a cold Wednesday night?  Cosiness, thy name is apple.