I made dessert!!

I am not a baker. Mostly it's because I have a hard time following directions so precisely. Now, I know that might surprise some people because I tend to be a fairly precise person but there's something rebellious that rises in me when a piece of paper is telling me what to do. I can't help it!

When I cook, I don't usually follow recipes. I use them as a starting point, a suggestion, a source of inspiration. As you can see from the recipes I've posted so far, they all say, "adapted from" or "based on" or something of that sort because I never follow a recipe exactly. First off, I very rarely measure anything, I eyeball it instead.

And that does not work well when baking. It needs to be more precise than that, especially if you are not  a regular baker.

However, as I was getting ready for Sunday dinner this past weekend, my mother posted a picture and video of a dessert on Facebook. I didn't look at the video until I saw the next day that a friend of mine had used her post to make an afternoon dessert and posted a picture that looked just like the one my mother had posted. I was intrigued so I watched the little video and it looked so simple!

I have said before that I rarely serve dessert with dinner but this weekend I did. Look!!

That was before they went into the oven.

Here's what they looked like when I took them out. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of them nicely presented on a pretty plate & dusted in powdered sugar but I had put my phone away by then.

Of course I didn't follow the recipe/video exactly. I used mango preserves instead of the recommended apricot because I could not find apricot jam or preserves without high fructose corn syrup and I didn't feel like going to multiple stores. Also, I doubled the recipe, which meant the time it took to "cook" the apples in water and lemon juice was a lot longer. You'll see in the video, it says to put the apple slices in the water and microwave for 3 minutes. It took about 9 minutes to do the double batch. Whatever you do, just make sure the slices are cooked enough to be soft and "rollable". You'll see why.

Here's the video: Baked Apple Flowers

I was amazed at how easy these were. A bit time consuming but really pretty simple and everybody loved them. They weren't too sweet, they were just the right size for a small dessert after dinner and I served them with plain vanilla ice cream. 

As an added bonus: Panda decided to have a porter float to go along with her dessert, which was also a big hit: pour any porter or other very dark beer into a tall glass - don't fill it all the way! It will overflow - then add a couple of scoops of vanilla ice cream and enjoy!