My experience with oven-baked entrees, however, has been growing. This Friday I made a tasty mushroom, tomato, and mozzarella pasta casserole. It really hit the spot… so much so, that I am down to my last bowl of leftovers for dinner tonight. I’m quickly learning that the casserole is one of the most beautiful dishes on earth – throw almost anything together with some cheese and breadcrumbs and you’re set.
I guess I was inspired to keep the oven-fires burning, (despite the sixty-degree weather), so I got out a recipe for Apple Butter Cupcakes. For those unfamiliar, apple butter is a variation of apple sauce, where the sugar in the apples is allowed to cook long enough to caramelize. The result is darker, sweeter, and awesome on crackers, bread, or, as it turns out, piped into the center of a cupcake.
The batter is a basic mixture of butter, sugar, eggs, flour, soda, nutmeg, and vanilla and I tossed in chopped Macintosh apples for texture. Now I am a spoon-licker with the best of them, but with this batter I was seriously in danger of not being able to make a full two dozen.
Once they were nice and golden, I let them cool before poking the center with a chopstick and filling each with a squirt of pure Pennsylvania Dutch apple butter (imported!). The recipe called for a pastry bag, but a plastic baggie worked just fine. So did Betty Crocker’s cream cheese icing. I could have attempted that one, but I figured the cupcakes were the star, so a little dab of store-bought icing wouldn’t hurt. Besides, when has store-bought ever bothered me?
The result was pretty much a success – the roommates and several of my coworkers benefited from my experiment and not one made a face (at least not that I saw). With a bunch of leftover ingredients, I think I’ll make them again next week for a Thanksgiving dinner with friends. Perhaps even a third time for the family dinner… let’s be honest, I just want more batter.
