This is the end. Time to go back to London. Helena asked her Grandma to bake an apple pie. Here’s a recipe.

To koniec. Czas wracać do Londynu. Helena poprosiła Babcię o upieczenie szarlotki. Oto przepis.

This is my childhood’s flavour. Mom tried to switch to a different recipe before and I have kindly asked her to abandon that blasphemy. This recipe is the best recipe for an apple pie. Others are usually quite delicious for inferior recipes.

This apple pie is:

• notgluten-free
• notvegan
• notvegetarian
• notdiabetics-friendly
• not good for pork-non-eaters

Eating a lot of it will get you into a bad health state. It is advisable you share it with others to dilute the guilt. If you don’t, don’t worry – it’s still worth it.

Apple pie

Planning

Just remember you need to cook the apples beforehand and cool them. You also need to chill the dough before baking.

You will need a big baking tray, around 40×35 cm, rather deep one (like the roasting tray to catch the dripping grease) and baking parchment to line it.

Ingredients

The ingredients are carefully measured to match the baking tray. You can scale it down but why would you?

Apples

• 2.5 kg apples
• a bit of sugar, depending on how sweet the apples are (to your preference). For this amount start with two tablespoons and see if you like it
• half a teaspoon cinnamon
• a heaped tablespoon breadcrumbs

Dough

• 1 kg plain flour
• 300 g icing sugar
• 400 g butter
• 50 g lard
• 8 egg yolks
• 2 heaped teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• pinch of salt
• 2 tablespoons of double cream
• two teaspoons breadcrumbs
• a bit of regular sugar for sprinkling (not more than a tablespoon)

Preparation

Apples

1. Peel the apples, slice them, add sugar and cook them on a rather low heat till they turn into a mash. Remember to mix from time to time
2. Once ready, put it aside to cool down
3. When cool, add the breadcrumbs and cinnamon and mix well

The cake

1. Knead the dough using the ingredients. While kneading, gradually add the cream – it will simplify the kneading and make the dough easier to work with
2. Chill the dough for an hour or two so that it’s rather stiff
3. Set the oven to 165-170C with convection. Know your oven
4. Split the dough into even portions
5. Put one half as an even layer on the baking tray and bake for 20 minutes
6. Sprinkle the baked bottom evenly with one tablespoon breadcrumbs
7. Place apples on this. I recommend leaving 1-2 cm margin so that the top and bottom layers of dough stick together. Trust me, I’ll explain why later
8. Sprinkle the apples evenly with one tablespoon breadcrumbs
9. Put an even top layer of dough on this
10. Prick with fork (in the good old days Google Translate did not translate such a sentence very well)
11. Sprinkle sugar on top
12. Bake for 55-60 minutes
13. Cool it down

This is the best. cake. ever. period.

The best piece of an apple pie

The border of the cake is a very important bit of it, especially the corners. The crust is so delicious I could leave the apples out to have even more of the thick treat.

Tuesday: back to work. How was your summer? Mine was appley.