Today I made spicy apple triangles. I got the idea to make spicy apple triangles from reading the recipes for a spicy apfelstrudel and a spicy granny's apple sauce. Plus I remembered a friend who made peppery speculaas (a dutch treat) some years ago.
Speculaas is a type of spiced biscuit, traditionally baked for consumption around St Nicholas' feast and Christmas.
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| Ready product - tasty. |
I am interested in exploring the spicy side of speculaas. Cinnamon is a very important ingredient, and in this case i replaced the original cinnamon in the apple triangle with my spicy speculaas, adding most importantly cardamom, pepper and cloves. I love clove.
Other ingredients that I considered but rejected are ginger and almond. I chose to leave these out to make my concoction into an extra spicy and evil one. I'm going for a 'evil santa claus' kind of thing: Christmassy flavour, but with a feisty spicy twist.
Ingredients:
12 puff pastry sheets
2 apples
3 handfuls of dried cranberries
1 handful of dried currants
1 handful of raisins
18 cloves
black pepper powder
cinnamon
cardamom
sugar
speculaas-spices (To form a taste base - this can be omitted and replaced with more cinnamon.)
1 beaten egg to glaze the top
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| The usual suspects... |
The making of an apple triangle is too simple for me to explain, so I won't. Instead I'll offer a few more considerations which you may find interesting.
* Depending on your taste you can use between one and two smashed cloves per triangle.
* Adding half a lemon's juice. Optional, to keep the apple from turning brown. But if you work quick enough you can cut the apple fast enough and immediately coat it in sugar and spice and everything nice, so it won't turn brown. I didn't add lemonjuice, for the same reason as why I didn't add ginger. The sour would balance out the spiciness, and I don't want that.
* Speculaas is a blend of spices. Ras-al-hanout is another, similar blend. These spice blends, just as the better known curry powder, or the garam masala blend, can be balanced to please your taste. You can find your own balance, in which case it's easy to take a bit of default blend, and then enforce certain notes, or add a surprising one.
* Other ingredients that could be considered are almond shavings (disregarded because of a colleague's nut allergy) and succade (too sweet and sour).
