Imagine diving into a deeply spiced, bubbling apple pie with a beautiful puff pastry crust, all with less than twenty minutes of hands-on effort.

Traditional pies make you work for your dessert with hours of chilling and rolling, but this recipe is the ultimate baking shortcut.

By swapping standard dough for store-bought puff pastry and quickly stewing the apples on the stovetop, you get bakery-level comfort food on a casual weeknight.

Best of all, the way your kitchen smells when this comes out of the oven — warm, sugary, and heavy with sweet cinnamon — is worth the effort alone!

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Ingredients

1 kg apples, peeled, cored and cut into chunks
¼ c sugar, Plus a little extra
2 tbsp verjuice
2 tbsp water
1 tsp cinnamon, plus a little extra
5 all spice berries
1 piece good puff pastry
1 egg, lightly beaten

Method

Preheat oven to 180°C

Place apples, sugar, verjuice, water, cinnamon and berries in a medium sized saucepan and cook for about 10 mins with a lid on. Shake the pot 3 or 4 times.

Pour the apple mix into a medium sized baking pan, shake over a little more cinnamon and sugar, then cover with pastry.

Crimp the edges of the pastry around the edge of the dish, brush with egg, sprinkle over more sugar, and bake for 30 mins or until the pastry is golden.

Scoop it into bowls while it’s hot and serve with a generous dollop of double cream or vanilla ice cream.