Caramel Apple Pie

I’ve been planning on baking a caramel apple pie for some time now. We found the recipe at one of our favourite stores, Quality Greens. I love this place. We can get a ton of great fruit and vegetables for much less than I always expect to pay. And their deli has some amazing sandwiches.

Anyway! So I found this pie. It seemed like the perfect thing to make while having dinner with my parents. My dad loves those little caramels and he’s a fan of apple pie. And I think I make a pretty decent pie crust.

And then we sit down, Dave starts on his chicken pot pie, and I’m having second thoughts. Maybe I don’t really want to make a pie. After all, we already have one pie – why would we want a second one? Only after constant prodding from my mom and nudging from Dave did I grudgingly decide to go through with the pie (and Dad showed a lot of restraint in not eating the caramels set). And it helped that Mom offered to peel the apples. I think peeling is the thing that prevents me from making apple pies more often. I hate it. No patience.

Mom started cutting the caramels almost instantly. This is as much her project as it is mine, since she did the dirty work. We have 20 caramels that need to be halved.

While Mom is working on the peeling and chopping, I get to work on the pie crust. Because I fear failure in the kitchen, I prefer to use this “never fail” pie crust with it’s secret ingredient: 7-Up. A pound of lard, six cups of flour, a teaspoon of salt, and eight ounces of 7-Up. Start with mixing the salt into the flour, then cut the lard into the flour until it turns into little pea-sized balls. After that, add the 7-Up. Mix, roll, turn into pies. Easy!

Maybe not that easy.

Thinking we wouldn’t need the whole pound of Tenderflake, I only made half. I get everything mixed up, I flour up my table so the dough doesn’t stick to it, and I start rolling. And the dough sticks to the table and the rolling pin. And I have flour on my shirt.

I fight with the crust. I don’t want to handle it too much. Someone told me that you shouldn’t play with it. It takes two tries, but I finally get it rolled out so it’s big enough to line the pie plate and at the same time, doesn’t stick to the table.

And it looks like this.

It actually looks pretty good! I’m fairly pleased, but I’m still pessimistic. Something is bound to go wrong.

Next, I mix up the sugar/cinnamon/flour coating for the apples. Last time I made apple pie, I used extra flour, so the pie wouldn’t end up all runny. I didn’t do that this time. I coat the apple bits with the mixture and throw half of it in the bottom of the pan. On top of this is a mixture that the recipe referred to as “taffy” but, in reality, is just brown sugar and melted butter that I crumbled over the first layer of apples.

At this point, I add half of the caramels, poking them into the apples and mix with an almost OCD precision. And I used exactly half.

Next half of the apples, covered in the rest of the “taffy” and added the rest of the caramels. I even resisted snacking on a caramel piece in fear that the number of caramels would be uneven.

(Actually, the caramels in this picture look more like hot dog pieces.)

And then comes the top crust. Same troubles I had with the bottom crust, only with a lot more flour ending up on my shirt.

We cover the pie in foil and it sits on the stove, waiting to be cooked.

Now that it’s out of the way, we realise there isn’t enough crust for the chicken pot pie. I have reservations about using such a sweet pie crust for the chicken, but Dave and my mom both assure me it will work out. So I bust out the other half of my dear friend Tenderflake and make even more pie crust dough.

I’m a little more wise to the ways of dough sticking to the table at this point and I flour it liberally. There’s minimal growling at this dough. The only problem is that it’s not big enough. But this is where Dave takes over.

Dinner is baked and we’re eating it when we throw the foil-covered pie into the oven. We figure it has to be covered in foil so the crust doesn’t bake too much but the caramels get a chance to melt. Twenty minutes at 375F with the foil, then another twenty-five minutes without.

And this is what it comes out looking like.

So we cut into it. Mmm. Pie.

Only, the caramels haven’t really melted, the apples still have a little crunch, I don’t like the look of the crust, and the entire thing is swimming in about a cup of apple juice/cinnamon/brown sugar juice. I remove the majority of this juice with a turkey baster, throw it in a cup, and drink it. In retrospect, maybe drinking it wasn’t such a good idea. But it was tasty!

Overall, I would say the pie looked better than it tasted. The half-melted caramels and semi-crunchy apple slices killed it. And all that juice. But it still tasted like a moderately not too bad apple pie. I feel I’m still one up on people who use canned apple pie filling.