#90 - Bake 50 Things that Aren't Cookies, Pies or Cakes Update

One of my absolute favorite things in the world to eat is baked apples. My mom used to make them for us when we were little kids and she'd make them very very simple. Just sprinkle some cinnamon and butter on them and bake them. Well I decided to get fancy the other day :p My family had come over for the Saints game on Sunday and I had cut up some honeycrisp apples and served them with a bowl of nutella to dip them in (best snack ever) but had lots of left over apple slices! I also had a bosc pear that I had been meaning to try.

So I decided to peel the pear and peel the remaining apples and bake them. And then get a little bit more fancy :P First, I heated my oven to 350 and melted about a half stick of butter in the bottom of a glass dish while I was peeling everything. Once that was melted, I mixed 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of white sugar and a splash of vanilla extract in with the butter to make a caramel base that would cook into a liquid and laid the apples and pears on top of that and let them cook on top of that for 30 minutes, then flipped everything over and let them cook for 30 more minutes until all of the fruit was soft. They came out looking like this:

I took the fruit out of the dish and put it into it's own dish:

Already looks yummy, right? But that wasn't good enough for me :p I was left with all of this yummy caramel-y goodness that had liquified in the glass dish. So I put that in a saucepot on the stove, threw in about 6 or 7 cloves and about 4 tablespoons of almond milk and brought it to a boil, constantly stirring it to reduce it...I cooked it I guess for about 5 minutes. In the end it looked like this:

I poured all that back over the fruit:

Then put some in a bowl and to make it extra yummy, I put some cold sweet vanilla almond milk on top of it. It basically tasted like melted vanilla ice cream making it taste like a perfect pie a la mode! This was SO GOOD!!!!! Good way to start off this goal ;)