Especially at Christmas, when the family gets together and wants to spend contemplative hours together, there is usually one person who is not there: the cook. He whirls through the kitchen for hours to serve his loved ones the most perfect possible Christmas menu. But that often means one thing above all – stress. Good for those who know how to help themselves. Because they exist, the dishes that everyone likes and can be conjured up without much effort. One of them is the baked apple.
Theodor Storm once wrote in a poem: “Pious children like to eat apples, nuts and almonds”. But not only them. The dessert evergreen belongs to the Christmas season like needles to the fir tree and is very easy to make. This recipe comes with candied ginger. And if that’s not enough extravagance, punch made from hollowed out apples is enough.
Ingredients for 4 persons):
4 apples (sour kind, e.g. Boskop or Braeburn) 1 tbsp butter 4 tbsp honey 1 tbsp gingerbread spice 1 tbsp coarsely chopped almonds or nuts, candied ginger
Preheat the oven to 170 degrees top/bottom heat. Wash apples (preferably a ripe, crumbly, slightly sour variety), cut off the top and generously cut out the core. Mix the remaining ingredients in a bowl, starting with the butter and honey. Pour this mixture into the apples and put the lid on. Place the apples in a casserole dish and roast in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes.
If you want to change the classic Christmas dessert a little, simply leave out the “lid” and crumble crumbles with speculoos over the filled apple. Custard or a scoop of vanilla ice cream won’t hurt either.
To do this, simply cut off the lid, cut out the core and generously cut out the flesh. If necessary, cut the apples flat at the bottom so that there is a stable base and the “containers” stand securely. Don’t cut too deep, because the apples should hold tight. For the hot apple juice, slice the apples with the peel on. Heat up together with the juice (preferably cloudy) and various spices (such as cinnamon, cardamom and star anise) and then serve.
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