Caramel apples, grown up

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Apple season heralds the fall, sure, but more importantly in my house it marks the beginning of October festivities: Oktoberfest, Halloween, the World Series. The kids and I won’t be chugging pilsner this year, but we’ve already started collecting pumpkins, celebrating Manny Ramirez’s return to the lineup -- and making caramel apples. Last weekend, I dipped a few crisp Galas into a pan of caramel sauce. They were pretty great -- specially considering that I’d made the sauce with Tahitian vanilla and fleur de sel -- but a little too gooey. So the next time, I tried dipping the apples into the pan of bronzed cooked sugar before I added the heavy cream to make the sauce -- instead of afterward. The sugar coated the apples and set up instantly, resulting in a gorgeous, more sophisticated version -- like Snow White’s apples set in glass. Instead of being gooey, they were crunchy, and the flavor of the apples came through instead of being masked. (They also made a pretty nice centerpiece, for the 20 minutes we were able to resist eating them.) Then I added the cream to the rest of the sugar and made some more caramel sauce, which goes fast in my household. A tip: Coat the apples quickly, then add cream to the rest of the sugar before the mixture hardens in the pot.

-- Amy Scattergood