Grandma’s Apple Twists

Guys. Stop what you are doing and make these. Now. They are seriously amazing. I did not give my Grandma credit. I admit it. To be fair, she passed away when I was 2 so it’s not like I doubted her abilities of making good food to her face. Maybe that’s not the best way to start. Let me start over.

My mom recently gave me my Grandma’s very old and much loved cookbook. She thought I may want to “vegetarianize” some of the recipes. I looked through and have a few things I plan to try, but most of all was the delicious desserts she has in there. There’s homemade fudge, apple crisp, cold dough cookie and these, the apple twists. Now I am not a baker. I don’t necessarily like to measure or follow instructions word for word, which is usually required for baking. This cookbook seems to be okay with that though, as there aren’t instructions word for word.

The thing about this cook book is that theres a lot of details missing, there’s also a lot of instruction that make me pause, like “um…are you sure?” The instructions for this say “Prepare apples. Make dough. Roll out a 16×10 rectangle & cut into 16 10×1 strips. Arrange without them touching. Brush wrapped apples with butter. Sprinkle sugar & cinnamon. Pour 1/2 cup water over pastry. Bake at 450 for 25-30 minutes.”

My favorite part is the “very good” written at the top.

Multiple things about this gave me pause. “Prepare apples”, I assume skin off? She wrote cored and sliced and some other word I can’t figure out. So I assume skin off? No, I’ve never made apple pie. I don’t know. “Make dough”, I’ve never done that, but I’ll throw those ingredients in and try. That worked out well. The one that really threw me the most was the cook temp, 450. By the time I got to this, the bottom of my pyrex was loaded with butter. I’m like, “Is this going to catch fire at 450? Butter’s burning point is 350.”

Naturally, I called my mom. She said no, but thought dropping the temp would be fine. Experiment with Grandma’s cookbook #1: done! Don’t worry, I’ll provide more detail than her cookbook does.*Side note: I plan to try them again at 450 at a later time, for now this worked perfectly with a little extra time required.*

Preheat oven to 375 and prepare your apples. Peel, core and cut them. You want to cut them into 8 slices from each apple (16 total). Make dough. Place 1 1/2 cups of flour into a mixing bowl. Add 1 tsp salt, and 1/2 a cup of coconut oil (the original recipe called for shortening, so that would work to). Begin to combine this. As it is combining, add 5 tbsp of cold water. Once dough is formed, remove from the bowl and knead a couple times to bring it all together.

Roll out your dough. Now, if you can figure out how to make a 16×10 rectangle, more power to you. Mine only managed like 12×10 and I said “close enough”. Also, if you desire to measure out 10×1 strips, again more power to you. I estimated 16 1 inch strips that varied a bit in length but were pretty close to 10 inches. Wrap each apple in a strip of dough and place it in a very well oiled baking dish, without them touching.

See why I was worried about fire? That’t a ton of puddled up butter.

Melt 1/4 cup of butter (original said 1/3 but I felt this was too much) and brush each pastry wrapped apple well. Sprinkle 1/4 cup sugar (original said 1/2, but holy..) and 1/2 tsp cinnamon across all the apples. Pour ~1/2 a cup of water over the pastry and bake for 1 hour. These are literally the best thing I have ever tasted. They would make a wonderful appetizer, holiday dish, or dessert. Enjoy!

Adding a note to mention that since you use a good amount of coconut oil these do end up with a hint of coconut taste/smell, which I thought was fantastic. If you aren’t a fan of coconut, you can switch it out for some other kind of shortening, like Crisco.