Baked apples

Chucking a few fruit in the oven for half an hour is so easy, it really shouldn’t produce such wonderful results as a baked apple. I can remember eating these at my grandparents’ home in New Plymouth and thinking it was odd they were cooking fruit, and that it looked so awful when it came out of the oven. However, I’ve never forgotten the taste and this is one of my favourite quick desserts. The baked apple is thought to have come about when, in the old days, people would suspend apples over the fire with string. In the 1800s, English poet and cook Eliza Acton wrote one of the country’s first cookbooks. It was aimed at the domestic cook and included a recipe for apple dumplings. This involved filling the apples with fruits and spices, and enclosing them in pastry. The fruit were then boiled, but you could try wrapping these apples in some puff pastry and baking them for something a little different. This dessert is also a great way to use up apples in the fruit bowl that have reached that point where no-one will touch them. My family all seem to have a special radar which tells them the moment an apple becomes overripe, even if it still looks fine. The best apples for this are Granny Smiths, because they fluff up and go very soft and marshmallow-like. And, despite the copious amounts of sugar and butter you add to each apple, it’s still fruit, which makes it a great idea for grandchildren who might be more interested in lashings of ice cream than some lovely nutritious fruit. You can always serve a little ice cream on the side to keep them happy.