Delicious Failure

It was a painful lesson, but I think I've finally realized that there is such a thing as too much butter.

I never used to think that there was such a thing. I was the type of kid who put so much butter on my mashed potatoes that they were literally swimming in butter soup. Not unlike the recipe I bring to you tonight, actually. But it makes me wonder where my butter obsession came from.

Thinking back on high school, I have a friend who then used to make her special kind of cake with six sticks of butter. Yes, you read that right: six. So it was more like fudge than "cake" per se, but the point is that it was utterly delicious. In that "Ah, I can hear my arteries clogging already" kind of way.

But even before high school, my family always said that, unlike chocolate, you really can put butter on anything. It's the flavor-booster of choice in my house, and I have to say that I've never been able to eat biscuits and jam without butter. It makes salty things pop and sweet things melt on the tongue.

But now I know that too much of a good thing can truly be too much.

What I was going for this time was baked cinnamon apples, not unlike those which, to me, make the perfect complement to Baby Back ribs at Chile's restaurants. What I got was baked cinnamon apple soup, so totally unlike the Chile's version that it's not even the same species.

Still, I think I can guess where I went wrong. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was the three tablespoons of butter. After my failed attempt, I looked up some recipes online and found that I had tripled the recommended amount of churned cow cream. Oops. That would be why my apples are swimming in a glistening lake of oil.

I could have stopped at this point and thrown the soupy concoction away, but despite (or perhaps because of?) my over-zealous use of butter, the dish smelled absolutely divine. The apples were moist and sweet, and I decided to just go for it and layered some on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream. The piping hot apples and butter soup sauce made short work of the ice cream. However, while this looks like something to fill a slop bucket, the taste is out of this world. Truly. It is like a root beer float, if the root beer were replaced with apple-butter sauce. It eats like a soup, but tastes like dream.

I have modified the directions so that the soup phenomena may not occur so badly, although if you want cinnamon-apple-ice cream soup, please feel free to triple the amount of butter.

Look for more dessert ideas (and hopefully not disasters, although hopefully just as delicious) all this week.

Butter-Cinnamon Apples and Ice Cream

Things you can pilfer from the dining hall:

Vanilla Ice Cream

2 Gala Apples

Honey

Cinnamon Sugar

1 Tablespoon Butter

Things you will probably have to buy:

3 teaspoons Brown sugar

Oven-safe covered baking dish (Try your local second-hand store. I found mine for $2.00 at Goodwill.)

1. Preheat toaster oven to 350^O F on Bake setting.
   
2. Peel, core, and slice apples into even sized pieces.
   
3. Layer 1/3 of the apples in the bottom of your baking dish. Sprinkle on 1 teaspoon Brown sugar. Layer in 1/3 Tablespoon butter. Drizzle honey. Cover layer with a thick coat of cinnamon sugar.

   

4. Repeat until all ingredients are used. The goal is something like baked apple lasagna, with apples for the noodles and everything else for filling layers.
5. Bake at 350^O F for 30-45 minutes. The apples should be bubbling and filling the room with wafting cinnamon apple smells before removal.
   
6. Carefully remove from toaster oven. Let cool 5-10 minutes. Layer over scoop of vanilla ice cream.
   

Enjoy!