Culinarylingus (vol 2) - Mini apple pies with caramel dipping sauce

Culinarylingus: Mini apple pies with caramel dipping sauce 

Prep time: 20mins               Cooking time: 15-20mins              Makes: about 20 

Is it just me or are our evenings getting a bit cooler? I’ve been going to bed with a bloody hot water bottle and it’s still summer… Anyway, here’s something to make you feel warm in your 100-year-old haunted flat – mini apple pies! The photo doesn’t do these guys justice because they’re meant to look like mini croissants but as per the image, they look like elf shoey-things? I just hope that if you make them, they look better than what’s displayed here. As for the caramel sauce (AKA caramel dulce de leche), I’ll chuck a wee recipe here for how to make it, but it is a 3hour process and you can buy caramel sauce in a jar instead… up to you. 

Ingredients: 

2 apples 

½ a tablespoon of cinnamon 

¼ of a cup of brown sugar 

1 pack of savoury puff pastry (pre-rolled)  

1 can of condensed milk 

How to make the mini apple pies: 
1. Pre-heat the oven on fan-bake at 180℃. 

2. If your pastry is still frozen, thaw it in some hot water until it is unfrozen lmao. 

3. Cut up an apple into slices like your mum used to as a kid, cut them at roughly 1cm apart. 

4. In a jar (with a lid) put the sugar and cinnamon in, chuck the lid on and shake it like a polaroid picture until the two are combined. 

5. Unroll your pastry flat and cut it up into pizza-shaped slices.  

6. Place one apple slice on the shortest edge (as pictured), sprinkle about a teaspoon of your sugar and cinnamon concoction on it and roll that bitch up! 

7. Repeat this for as many apple-slices you have and place them on a tray covered in baking paper. 

8. Bake them in the oven for 15-20mins and for god’s sake – check on the bastards so that they don’t burn. 

9. Take them out of the oven once they look a nice golden-brown, serve with your caramel dipping sauce and enjoy! 

How to make the caramel sauce (AKA caramel dulce de leche):  
1. Put a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot on its side and cover it with hot water. 

2. Make the water simmer with your magic hands (or by putting the stove on, whatevs). 

3. Check on it every 30mins and leave it in there for 3hours.  

4. If by now you’ve realised that making the sauce from scratch is more trouble than it’s worth, go buy some caramel sauce. 
5. Top up the water with boiling water from the kettle if need be. 

6. Once 3 hours is up, take the can out of the water and let it cool down to a non-hand-burning temperature to pick up.