An Abundance of Apples

A couple of weeks ago I bought a bag of apples at my local farmer's market with the intent of making several things, which never quite happened.  I inspected the apples last night and found that one or two of them had gone soft.  Obviously I needed to cook them up, quick!

My first apple pie

Someone in this house (I won't name names) is not overly fond of my apple crisp because it's not sweet enough.  So I decided to try my hand at apple pie.

I dug through my Joy of Cooking (I wonder if anyone in my family has my grandmother's "secret" recipe?) and roughly followed the basic apple pie recipe.  I followed the instructions for a 9" crust, and then discovered I have a 10" pie pan.  Oops.  I will need to fix that if I make this again.  But it covered enough., and into the over it went.

Isn't it a thing of beauty?  (not)  I am obviously not ready to compete with Ever So Humble Pie Company.  The whole kitchen smelled delicious, regardless.


But wait!  There's more! 

French Apple Cake (which passed Poison Check)

I had more apples than would fit in the pie.  While flipping through my cookbook, I came across something called French Apple Cake which seems to be an upside-down cake.  It was an odd recipe:  all of the sugar goes into the fruit; the batter is unsweetened.  And there's not much batter.  I gave it a try.  I had a hard time spreading the batter over the apples because there wasn't that much of it.  So this thing ended up being mostly apples with a bit of biscuit/cake over it.  I didn't had a chance to flip it out of the pan; it was still a little too warm to chance it.  But as you can see from the photo, I did a poison check (there was even less of it left by the time I finished writing this).  Maybe this will make it easier to turn upside-down?

We did not get a chance to try the pie (it was late by the time it came out of the oven).  If the taste-test of the apple cake is any indication, I think pie will be a keeper.  But that awaits the final verdict of the Judge.