Test Kitchen - Personal Apple Pies

Hello there!  'Tis the season for gatherings and parties and what better way to celebrate than with a bit of dessert?  I made these personal apple pies with inspiration from Renata at Testado Provado Eaprovado blog for our office wide Thanksgiving feast this week and although they didn't turn out quite like I imagined them, they weren't too shabby!  

I started out with a dozen medium sized granny smith apples and sliced off the top of the apple.  The hubs and I then proceeded to go to town on the apples coring each one first with a melon baller to eliminate the seeds (we found that it had nice sharp edges to work with) and then with a spoon to get the rest of the good stuff.  There was some trial and error early on in the process but eventually we had a mini assembly line going.  

To keep the apples from going brown, we periodically sprinkled them with a bit of lemon juice.  

In a separate bowl mix together the following ingredients:

12 Tbsp sugar

6 Tbsp all purpose flour

3 tsp powdered cinnamon 

Sprinkle over the apple bits and toss well.  Spoon the bits into the hallowed out apples.  

For the topping, I took a shortcut by using store bought pie crust to crown the apples and then I used a small flower shaped cookie cutter to create the pattern but really, anything goes.  Just provide a little bit of space for the apples to vent while baking.  Have fun with it!

Ok, so we were quite proud of ourselves up to that moment.  Everything was looking really good!  I put them into a 370 degree oven for 40 minutes with the intent on checking back every so often.  Then I got caught up watching last night's How I Met Your Mother (for those of you who watch it, I hope you know what I mean when I let out an audible "gasp!").

I ran to the kitchen after the show finished and panicked.  This is what came out -

Yup.  The apple containers exploded.  All that work down the drain.  

And if you don't already know by now, I'm not an expert baker of any kind so a number of things might have been the deciding factor to their demise:

a.  I left them in the oven too long

b.  I didn't allow for enough venting

c.  The temperature of the oven was set too high

d.  A mystery yet to be solved

e. All of the above

I'm going to go ahead and go with E.  Do any of you know what could've happened?

I still needed to get a dessert together for the feast so I wasn't going to give it all up.  I proceeded to carefully spoon all the fillings of the cooked apples filling including the pretty topping carefully into cupcake liners.  They held up pretty well, thankfully and no one was the wiser!  

Two of the apples survived the ordeal and I'm happy to present them here as my intention all along:

Hopefully you'll have more luck than I did and in the meantime, I will try this recipe again. Cheers!