Is it weird that cooking and baking with some ingredients intimidate me? Yeast for bread baking used to give me the heeby jeebies and, fun fact, I even went as far as to use it as one of the topics for my college essays. What?! You never used a fungus to help sway your way into higher education? #lonewolf
Well, apparently it worked because I’m in college (woo!) and eventually overcame that weird phobia and now can make delicious baked goods like focaccia and Norsk boller and cinnamon rolls.
Annnnddd guess what! Today I crossed off another food-related fear and used puff pastry. There’s something so intimidating about it. Like, for reals, there must be some catch behind all those flaky layers. I had this idea in my head that the dough would be all temperamental and cranky to work with or that I would need to let it rise a million times, but nope. The exact opposite is true. EASIEST thing ever.
Okay, okay. Maybe using pre-made puff pastry is cheating slightly, but ain’t nobody got time to make their own. I’m all about convenience, and if using store-bought dough means I can have Salted Caramel Apple Turnovers in my mouth that much faster, sign me up! No food snobbery here.
The hardest part of this recipe is probably cutting the apples. Especially if you’re like me and have to stop every 30 seconds to eat the peeled apple skins. My Obachan (Japanese grandma) always laughs at me and calls me rabbit for nibbling on the scraps, while my mom scolds me for my “dangerous” apple cutting technique. Ahhhh family love at its finest.
Once the hard part is over, you get all your apple bits and caramel ingredients going in a pot. Add a little heat, and presssttooo!
Then, you take out that scary looking puff pastry, unroll it, and cut it into squares. Add a dollop of apple filling into the middle (don’t get too excited and overfill them like me, though), fold the square into a triangle, crimp the edges, and throw em in the oven.
And that’s it. You pull these gorgeous and bakery-worthy treats out of the oven and impress everybody. I’ve been staying over at Kyle’s apartment with his roommates, and shocked them by serving these babies up in 30 minutes. One of his roommates exclaimed that he JUST saw me stewing up some apples a few minutes ago, then all of a sudden I had these gorgeously flaky pastries on a plate in front of them. They probably think I’m some sort of magical goddess of turnovers now. Throw in an intense World Cup match (ahhhh the PK shootout!) and you’ve got yourself a house full of happy boys.
These are perfectly sweet and the flake-factor of the puff pastry itself is insane. Oh! And a pretty drizzle of powdered sugar glaze is completely mandatory.