Apple cookies

Last weekend, the whole family piled up in the car and we went to an apple festival. It was fun, not huge, but nice anyway. And I did purchase apples. Unfortunately, although I asked the vendor which apples were best for baking, I made the mistake of not taking pictures of the apples with their names. It would have been so much easier than trying to figure out what these apples were and how to use it once they made it home. But I tried...

However, for future reference, I did find these two websites (one and two) that list all the varieties of apples and how to use them. Very useful!

So, with all these apples, I wanted to make a couple of things. More than two, actually, but my husband ate a lot of the apples... they were indeed delicious!

I wondered if apple cookies existed, so I looked, both on English and French websites. And I found this recipe. It looked really good and the picture made me salivate. However, a word of warning, the end product I got was so far from that picture, that it looks like a different recipe. I have a few ideas as to why, but I’ll come back to that.

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Ingredients:

• 1 apple (make sure it is one type that is very flavorful when baked, NOT Golden Delicious and similar ones)
• 1 tbsp of sugar
• 100g of butter, at room temperature, cut in small pieces
• 180g of flour
• 60g of powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp of apple juice
• 1 egg
  

Preparation:

1. Peel and cut the apple in tiny pieces. Put them on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Put in the oven (250º). Move the apples around a little so that they dry well but not too much as they need to still be a bit soft in the middle. After 30 minutes, sprinkle the tbsp of sugar on the apples, mix and bake for another 10 minutes. Let the apples cool.
2. For the dough, pour all the other ingredients in a bowl and mix until you get a smooth dough.
3. Add the cooled apples and mix.
4. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour.
5. Preheat the oven at 325º.
6. Roll the dough and cut your cookies with a cookie cutter.
7. Put each cookie on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Bake for 15-17 minutes, until slightly golden (but still pale).
8. Let cool before eating.
   

Notes:

• The choice of apples is very important. Do not choose a variety that is very juicy. I think the ones I chose were too close to the Golden Delicious variety, they looked, felt, smelled and tasted so similar, if I didn’t know I didn’t purchase Golden Delicious, I’d have been fooled. I baked the apples for the recommended time but they were far from dry. I used them anyway... I think that is what explains most of the differences in the original recipe and mine.
• I also didn’t wait until the apples were cooled before mixing them into the dough and I think it overheated the dough, forcing me to add flour (almost ½ cup). I also had to leave the dough in the fridge overnight to have a firm enough dough to roll and cut. And even then, I needed to freeze the leftover for 15-30 minutes before I could roll it again.
• The original recipe called for 12 minutes of baking time. I don’t know if it’s because my dough had a high level of liquid, but it took 15-17 minutes for them to be ready.
  

Results:

The original recipe showed a picture that led me to believe these would be cookies, with a certain crunch, but delicate.

I got cookies that look fantastic (I had an apple-shaped cookie cutter I had never used). They are quite pale, almost like sugar cookies, with an texture between cake and biscuit. Their taste is also really nice, very subtle. Because I used an apple with little taste after baking, you can’t really taste the apples, unfortunately. But I liked that the cookies are moist and slightly sweet, meaning that you don’t taste the sugar like in a sugar or chocolate chip cookie, but you don’t feel like an ingredient is missing either.

I am pretty happy with the result, even though it was quite a challenge. I would definitely redo them, making sure to choose a different apple.

Enjoy!