Apple Season Dessert and 6 Tips To Make You a Pastry Pro

Yes, Apples have their own Season!
Strudel is our top Apple dessert choice. We offer you this easier runner-up.
Plus 6 tips to becoming a pastry pro.

Apple Season is here.

I don’t have to check the calendar to know it’s Apple Season.

Every year, this is the time when I’m ravenously hungry for a bite of crisp, tart apple, with a side of Kraft caramels. Most people melt the caramels and dip their apples. Not me. Try a bite of apple from one hand then a bite of caramel held in the other hand.

A time capsule from my past:

Hands grimy from sifting through crackly fallen leaves, saving the best to tuck into the pages of Dad’s huge Webster’s.

Then watching my Grandmother pushing a rolling pin over and over unbelievably thin pastry. Pastry dough that covers the entire flour-sprinkled vinyl tablecloth.

Here comes mom with a huge bowl full of cinnamon scented sliced apples. She carefully spreads them all over the pastry.

Then,

The big moment.

My apple and caramel are held suspended in mid-air, as

Gramma lifts one edge of the table cloth and the magic begins…

Slowly the pastry and apples roll up into a long cinnamon-scented, apple-oozing snake.

Mmmm. This drool worthy scent is merely anticipation of the evening meal’s dessert.

The eating of it surpassed anything apple I’ve had since those days when mom and gramma cooked in tandem.

Apple strudel made the good old-time way.

Apple Season Dessert at its best.

We promised you an easy Apple Season dessert that comes close to Gramma’s old fashioned strudel. No wielding a rolling pin over and over a table covered with paper-thin pastry.

You need a rolling pin, but not paper thin pastry!

And you may as well start salivating now.

The smells will get you as soon as you open the lid on the cinnamon. And sprinkle it over sugar-glazed sliced apples.

But hold it. You have to bake this sweet stuff. Forty five minutes until Apple Season grand finale.

Danish Apple Bars Dessert

Here you are… just hit print and start peeling apples.

Print Recipe

Danish Apple Bars

Glazed flaky crust layered with sweet, cinnamon apple goodness. Best dessert since Grandma's Apple Strudel.

Ingredients

Pastry

• 2½ cups flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup shortening, cold
• ½ cup ice water
• 1 tsp white vinegar
• 1 egg, separated
• 2 cups corn flakes

Filling

• 5 cups sliced apples
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Instructions

Pastry

• Whisk the salt and flour together.
• Shred the cold shortening into the flour, and stir with a fork. This should look like flour coated, pea-sized shortening pieces.
• Separate the egg, setting the egg white aside. Place the egg yolk and 1 tsp. vinegar into a 1 cup measure, add water to make ⅖ cup. Whisk together until smooth.
• Pour the liquid over the flour/shortening mixture and stir with a fork just until all the flour is moistened and you can form a ball.
• Divide pastry into two balls. Roll each ball on wax paper the size of a jelly roll pan. Place one crust in the pan, without the wax paper.
• Sprinkle slightly crushed corn flakes over the crust layer in the pan.
• Spread the apple mixture over the corn flakes, and cover with the second layer of pastry. Remove the wax paper.
• Whip the egg white with a small whisk, and brush over the pastry top.
• Bake at 350° for 30 minutes.

Apple Filling

• Peel and core the apples. Cut into eighths, then slice into a mixing bowl.
• Mix the sugar, flour and cinnamon together in a small bowl. Pour over the apples and stir all together.

These bars are perfect any time. If there’s a pan of these around, I’ve been known to eat them for breakfast.  But hot from the oven with vanilla ice cream: yes, ma’am.

6 Tips to help you become a pastry pro.

At one point in my baking journey I researched pastry making with American flour. (As a Canadian baking with red wheat flour, the all-purpose flour in our local Arizona grocery stores proved a challenge.) These are some tips I picked up. Some I still use, others helped me learn.

1. Pastry dough can get tough.  You don’t want to hear about the time I tried making pie crust with a brand of flour I hadn’t used before.  I never made pie again until a Tupperware lady showed us how to make pie crust in a bowl, and that became my go to pastry trick.  After cutting the lard into the flour, add the liquid, and place it in a bowl with a tight fitting lid.  Shake the bowl until you hear the dough thumping inside.  It becomes a ball almost like magic.  Now that I’ve learned how the flour works in our area, I no longer use the bowl trick.
2. There’s a saying that extra shortening makes flakier crusts.  A crust recipe I use a lot has a 2:1:1/2 formula: 2 cups flour, 1 cup shortening, 1/2 cup liquid.  That’s more than the Danish Apple Bars calls for, but the egg yolk and vinegar help keep it flaky, also.
3. Cover the pastry dough and place in the fridge for an hour before rolling out.  Resting the dough lets the gluten relax, and the crust won’t shrink as much while baking.
4. I don’t have a legitimate handle-less rolling pin, but I have a 10″ piece of 2″ PVC pipe.  It works great.
5. Press the dough ball as flat as you can with your hands (or a piece of waxed paper so the heat from your hands doesn’t transfer to the dough) before starting to roll with the rolling pin.
6. Sprinkle flour over the dough as needed to roll it out so it doesn’t stick to the rolling pin. Another trick, so you don’t add too much flour while rolling the crust, is to roll it between two sheets of waxed paper.
7. EXTRA TIP: Just in case your recipes are all jumbled in your junk file, and you need to manage them before the busy Christmas food season arrives, here’s a link to our best selling recipe keeper.

I don’t think I’ll ever try to make Gramma’s Apple Strudel, but this Apple Season Dessert comes as close to tasting like hers that I have found.

So enjoy trying this dessert, and…

We hope your Apple Season is old timey, drool worthy happy.