Let’s be honest. Every excuse to talk about Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart is one thing, but this? Baking apple pie that represents how broken up my heart actually was after the second book seemed a bit appropriate all things considered!
Seriously, though, why not. I had apples. I wanted to play with pie crust. And, um, there’s also the fact that Jacks exists in the fictional world.
tl;dr
(click on the pie crust recipe here)
In one elegant move, the young man reached into the inner pocket of his ripped burgundy coat, pulled out a pure white apple, and took one bite. Dark red juice dripped from the fruit to his long, pale fingers and then onto the pristine marble steps.
Once Upon a Broken Heart – Stephanie Garber
I don’t think the whole thing with the apples have really been explained quite yet in either Once Upon a Broken Heart or The Ballad of Never After, but one thing is for sure: Jacks seems to magically conjure them up from everywhere, and they’re differently colored. I don’t know if this was explained in the Caraval series, but as far as I know, it’s safe to say that whatever the case, we can certainly associate Jacks with apples.
It smelled of him; of apples and magic and cold, moonlit nights.
The Ballad of Never After – Stephanie Garber
And if we don’t associate him with apples, Evangeline surely does. Lord, I could probably go on. Because yeah. These two are killing me slowly with the poisonous sugary stuff that these two are made of.
In any case, I embarked on a mission. What if I actually tried playing with the pie crust on my apple pie? Can a broken heart actually be designed similarly to the US covers of the book? (Which, honestly, I preferred much better than the UK ones I’ve seen). How about that broken arrow in TBoNA? And what are these questions if not hypotheses waiting to be experimented on?
(Too much science teaching…must abort.)
Alright, so I’ve been making the same pie crust ever since I’ve started baking apple pies, and this is still by far my favorite effortless way to make crust. The only difference is the fact that I actually pre-baked this pie with weights (sometimes I forget I have dry black beans…) I also fiddled around with parchment paper to see if I could possibly do pie cutouts once I can roll the crust into circles.
And whaddaya know? I actually could! On hindsight, I probably didn’t need to bake the bottom crust before I baked the whole pie. This would have prevented the weird crust top that I was getting after the bake. The arrow is also a bit misshapen, but that’s because it’s really hard to cut out an arrow in a straight line…so I might have needed a straight edge there.
Whatever the case is, the apple filling, with the crust, was delicious!
I kind of improvised the apple mixture, though, so there isn’t much to this recipe.
My filling contained: 2-3 apples (pink ladies for Evangeline, of course!), 1/4th cup of brown sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4th cup of melted butter. Mixed, then the whole pie was baked at 350 for some 40 minutes (I checked every 20 minutes to make sure the apples were cooked.
It was definitely a fun spin on an oldie recipe! No regrets here. Maybe next time I can do an even more complicated heart! (Or…ya know…not…)
Story and Somnomancy 