Here we are sitting in Portugal, where the sun should be out and beaming down on us very, very often and where our expectations for November are very, very high, but….
Oh, sometimes I really don’t like ‘but’! The last week has been raining a lot, it is quite cold, it’s humid and I am already wearing my winter jacket. Okay, to be fair I love my winter jacket so I use it to keep myself warm anywhere I am.
Having to live in these conditions, when expectations are so high, is really not easy at all. So we are looking for some solutions and one of them that came to my mind was baked apples…. hot baked apples…. drunk apples!!!! Suddenly an easy and fast recipe was bouncing around in my head.
This is actually a Portugues recipe, I guess it should be called ‘Portuguese roasted apples with Port wine’. But, to make it more easily available to everyone around who might not have Port to hand, I have my own recipe. Actually, I was never really trying out the original one and have always just used my own.
So forgetting the original recipe, what do I use? Here comes the list with just four, or maybe five, ingredients:
- Apples – 6
- Red wine – 1 bottle (originally Port, because it is sweeter and thicker than the average red)
- Honey – 9 dessert spoons
- Cinnamon – 6 sticks
- Brown sugar – the optional fifth ingredient
Like I said it is a super fast, easy and tasty recipe and a great ‘healthy’ dessert for your guests. Here is how to prepare it:
- Wash the apples (I would recommend
to use cooking apples so they stay in a nice shape during baking), remove thecores and seeds, but do itcarefully and do not cut through the bottom. - Put the prepared apples into a
baking dish, stuff each one with a spoon of honey (I used ecological honey from my aunt’s bees) and put a cinnamon stick into each apple. - Now it is time to pour wine in each of apple and in the dish around them (I put a lot of wine so the apples stew in it) and add 3 spoons of honey to the wine in the dish.
- Bake the apples for around 50 min at 200 °C (this depends on the kind of apples, if they are with soft skins and generally softer apples then 30 minutes might be enough).
- Just before the apples are baked you can sprinkle them with brown sugar and put back into the oven.
- Serve them warm!!!
Actually, I always serve them swimming in the wine from the dish and together with a decent glass full of the wine from the dish as well. It’s wintry and warming and definitely more than okay to drink the wine from the pot! Believe me, after this you do not feel so cold for a while!