Micro Wordalicious + Foxy Mamas Love Baking: Mrs. Bean's Famous Nutmeg Ginger Apple Snaps

Best devoured voraciously, and with a warm mug of apple cider. Luis Valdizon photo credit.

Hey, y'all!

If you came here looking for a Wordalicious Wednesday post last week, I'm sorry. Here is a term that many people, including myself, don't use often enough: NO, as in nein, non, or go sit on a Microplane grater. This word is powerful and can be used effectively, but sometimes we forget that. I must practice, or else my sanity is going to pick up and look for a new host.

It's time to be up-front and rant for a second: This entire past October has been very incredibly stressful, and at the moment, I'm bloody fatigued. Just within the last week, there was a death in what I consider to be my extended family, our kitchen has needed me to work late for events, Halloween was a massacre (literally. People opened fire into a crowd, just steps away from our restaurant's front doors), everyone at my old job is ill so I've been filling in on my days off while they're shortstaffed, and the entire time, ignoring the commitments I've made to myself while helping everybody else, which is a spot of bad news.

Yesterday, at Changes, my friend Rhonda and I had a conversation about why we would be perfect to run a bakeshop together: We're a perfectionist super-team of businesswomen who love baking and creating gorgeous things, are addicted to pastries, and obsessed with details. Whether it's perfecting a swirl of frosting on a cupcake, piping uniform rosettes onto a sheet, writing in feminine, loopy script, or twirling a mound of pasta while lowering it onto a plate, everything that I make, and do, must look good. It's a part of who I am.

Once I become good at something, I push to get it right every time afterward, and actually relish the progressive learning curve. My brother says that my standards and expectations are always too high because I care so much about everything, and he's absolutely right, because the effort that you put into something really does show. It's why if I decide to do something, one-hundred percent of my effort goes into it, or else I might as well lie down in my PJs, because putting out that level of energy is tiring! There is an everybody get lost, it's pajama time day tentatively scheduled for me next week.

Whilst on the topics of food, family, meticulous tendencies and cool pajamas, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of my all-time favourite movies. Wes Anderson completed a brilliant project that already would have been labour-intensive from the get-go because of stop-motion animation, but his personal touch and attention to fine details is what made it extra-special. I love his films, and it definitely helps that he created a food-centric piece of work for children, but wrote it with adults in mind. Mr. Fox was intricately detailed, vibrantly joyful, clever, and emoted a sense of nostalgic whimsy and childlike wonder.

One of my many favourite parts of the movie is when Ash and Kristofferson sneak into Bean's kitchen to look for Fox's tail, and ravage a warm plate of Mrs. Bean's famous nutmeg ginger apple snaps. They were some of the prettiest cookies that I have ever seen, and it became a mission to figure out how to turn them into a reality! There were a few recipes online, including an official one from Mario Batali, who voiced Rabbit, the chef in Mr. Fox, but all of them yielded cookies that didn't look like the ones on the plate. Here, for you, is a recipe that sparkles like the treats in the movie, and tastes like an East Coast Fall season in the living room of a baking fairy grandmother. Even better, the cookies are crunchy around the edges and chewy in the middle, underneath the apple. Hooray!

Luis Valdizon photo credit.

Kari's Version of Mrs. Bean's Famous Nutmeg Ginger Apple Snaps
Makes 30 to 36 cookies, depending on size

2 cups unsalted butter, cubed and softened
2 tbsp molasses
6 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 pinch ground clove
1 tsp grated nutmeg
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger
3 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
4 cups all-purpose flour or gluten-free all-purpose baking mix
2 tsp cornstarch
1 pinch salt
4 gala apples
1/2 cup coarse sugar for sprinkling


Preaheat oven to 325°F and move racks to the center level.

Cream the butter in a high-sided bowl, with an electric mixer for a few minutes until it's light-coloured and easily forms peaks. Add the molasses, brown sugar, white sugar, spices, grated ginger, and vanilla extract, and whip again until fully blended.

Sift the flour, cornstarch, and salt together, then add to the butter mixture in 3 batches, carefully and on low speed, until the ingredients are fully blended.

Roll dough into 2 to 3 tbsp balls, and flatten them on parchment-lined cookie sheets.

Slice the apples as thinly as you can, to about 2mm thickness. Firmly press a slice of apple into the center of each cookie. Sprinkle coarse sugar evenly over cookies to coat, paying special attention to the edges.

Bake 12 to 15 minutes, depending on your oven, until edges turn golden. Rotate the pan halfway through baking, and let cookies cool on the sheet before moving. Store in an airtight container.

Notes: A test cookie was made, with sections of granulated white, organic refined, and turbinado sugars to see which coated the best. The organic refined sugar in Whole Foods' bulk gravity bins gave the cookies that attractive sparkliness, and formed a protective syrup that kept the apple slices from turning brown a day later. The crystals were slightly larger than granulated white sugar, and were a perfectly glittery, creamy colour. If you're not able to find it, sanding sugar is a great substitute and is available at baking suppliers and specialty stores.

Definitely the most memorable time that my crafty stuff has come in handy and saved the day. Luis Valdizon photo credit.The Red Remarkable apples in the photos were hand-painted. I picked up a medium-tip golden paint pen that unfortunately, didn't show up well on the fruit, even after a good scrubbing. Brushwork is fun, but hope that the words "I can't believe I'm $%#*ing painting apples at this hour!" never come out of my mouth again.

If there are any movie aficionados out there who want to argue that these cookies produce a crunch, and not a snap, like a ginger snap, and that there are no stems on the apple slices, I will tell them that adding extra molasses would turn the cookies dark brown, and they have way too much time and too many apples on their hands. Chill out and eat some cookies!
 
My recipe and writing process is usually a solitary adventure, so I would like to thank local photographer Luis Valdizon of www.minorublvd.com for picking leaves and pinecones, insisting that we hunt for sugar, grinding whole cloves with my mortar and pestle, taking the beautiful finished photos, adding the cute titles, playing episodes of Bored To Death while I cursed at my apple-painting skills, being a Wes Anderson fan, too, and helping me in my quest to be just a little more "quote unquote fantastic."

Eat well!

Kari

Comments

[Meghan]

These look just like them and I am sure that they will taste delicious. Thank you!!

[[karitickle]]

Thanks, Meghan! These were super fun to make and my coworkers loved them...for days, music from the movie was stuck in my head afterward! Hee!!

xo K