Everybody, welcome Angela, the newest T.O.B. Cook. Angela is my dear friend from the North.
We were both Northern girls and adored our birthplace… but I married and moved to the Midlands to be with the Bear and she married and then moved away even further. She’s ended up in Georgia, USA.
Angela’s the one I think of when I try and do gluten-free food as she is coeliac (or celiac as they spell it in the USA) We keep in touch, most days, through email and Facebook and she follows what happens on here. She’d read the posts on Apple Butter and Apple Butter Cake and, after a jaunt out with her neighbours where she picked apples, decided to see what she could do….this is what she wrote to me this morning:
“I needed to make some bread so, I thought, as I was putting the oven on, I might as well make the apple cake. And as I was chopping apples, I thought, I might as well make the apple butter. OK, I’m not a novice in the kitchen, but I’m not an accomplished chef either…. maybe it was all a bit over-enthusiastic…
Oh, I started off by sterilising the jars and the lids – in the dishwasher!!! Only the Americans could come up with such an easy way? That gave me a couple of hours to get everything done….
So I mixed the gluten-free bread mix, put it in the laundry room to rise. That gave me 45 minutes….
I chopped all the apples, putting 4 ½ lbs in a pan with apple cider vinegar, which then got left whilst I…
… made the cake mix. I used “Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Baking Flour” to which I added Xanthan Gum. I had no yoghurt so used low fat sour cream. I, for some reason, bought brown sugar instead of caster sugar.
I, for some reason, bought canola oil and can’t find out why.
(I’d already been shopping on Thursday, but then went back up again on Friday! But – I did see a good yard sale……)
Vanilla pods were replaced by ‘fake’ vanilla and I had no bicarb!!! Instead of “3 smallish apples and a box of stewed apple” I used 3 large apples – too many apples to be honest!
45 minutes was up, so the bread and the cake went in the oven.
Apples by this time had been left for over an hour… but were nicely mushy. I don’t have a Mouli and, to be honest, I do as little transferring and dirtying of dishes as possible.
(Hey, I’d already used two bowls for the bread, two bowls for the cake, chopping boards, pans, cake tins, bread tins…. the kitchen looked like a massacre… and by this point last night’s empty wine glass kept catching my eye….)
So, I used ‘Billy Blender’… I have to say I thought it would be really sharp – apples plus cider vinegar, but it tasted good – so no sugar was added.
It was 6.30, what about tea? So on top of all that I started making a salmon and prawn risotto.
Stir the apples, stir the risotto. Wine was required for the risotto……
Bread was taking an age, so turned the oven down for the bread and the cake. I think they were both in for an hour, maybe the cake was in for a bit longer.
Risotto was nice, if a little too much wine had been added!!!
Bread was normal – takes longer than it says on the packet, but gets there in the end.
Cake was absolutely gorgeous. Very moist – quite heavy. As I don’t eat cake or biscuits very often it was absolute bliss. I had been cooking since 4.30. By now it was 8 – 8.30 pm.
The spoon was leaving a trail. So…. jar filling….
What the hell happened?!?!?
3 jars? 3 jars is all I got.
Four bloody hours of cooking and I got 3 measly 8 oz jars!!!
I’d bought 12 Mason jars! Cost me 10 bucks!
4½ lb of apples and I got 3 measly jars. What went wrong?
I used 4½ lb and I got 3 jars. Lorraine got 10 jars – dunno what 14 cups translates as? You used 3lbs – how many jars did you get?
Maybe I cooked it for too long? Maybe I didn’t cook it for long enough – it’s more like jam/spread than ‘butter’.
It tastes OK – very, very rich taste though. But with vinegar – no need for sugar, which is good?
I won’t be making apple butter again, but will, most definitely, make the cake! And bread. And risotto…..”
I read all of this when I got to work in the morning and yes, I laughed.
Not in a mean way, you understand, but as I often laugh when I read her emails. I could just picture her glaring at the pans and staring at the wine bottle. I laughed at the thought of her looking at the canola oil and wondering why she bought it. I could just imagine her outrage at only ending up with 3 jars… “THREE measly jars”.
I suppose I should have told her than when I did my second batch of Apple Butter I did, in fact, use at least ten or twelve pounds of apples….
Still, she has cake that she can eat while she plans going out to get more apples!
Let her eat cake, I say…..
Angela, the 14 cups was after peeling, coring all the apples. I think I started with approximately 10 lbs of apples to which sugar was added. Mine did not come as thick as Wendy’s but according to my receipe this was it. I stirred and stirred well past the time required by the book. I think it also depends on the type of apples used – some are more juicy than others. Living in Georgia, heard the Peaches are the best – try Peach Butter.
That’s a serious amount of improvising/adapting going on there. I LOVE it! Who needs to follow a recipe religiously anyway, life is an adventure.
I agree, BBF, cooking can never be precise (unless it is pastry or sugar work) because each piece of food will be different… one onion can be sweet and another harsh… each apple has different levels of juice and sugar depending on the climate it was grown in or the specific variety. You HAVE to adapt! And I love it when my friends, wherever they are in the world, cook along… it’s like having your friends beside you and that’s a great feeling!
Lorraine – Peach butter is big around here, but I’ve still never tried it! Also – I have been here 18 months now, but still have no spatial awareness of a ‘cup’!
BFF – I have never been one to follow rules my dears! Besides – I’d already been shopping twice in 24 hours, and really couldn’t afford to drive ‘past’ another yard sale!
If you are going to do butter again, I would try the cider vinegar. Healthier than sugar?