Long and Slow Apples

Dorie Greenspan: Around My French Table: Recipe 9

This recipe is called Long and Slow Apples because  the apples cook in the oven, in ramekins, for two hours.  It's a shortening of another recipe called twenty-four hour apples.  You slice apples thin, stack them in layers in the ramekins coating them with melted butter and a sugar mixture which has ginger and coriander added in.  Orange zest is optional, and I chose to use it.  I filled the ramekins to the top but after two hours in the oven they had shrunk so that the ramekins were only one-third full.  The apples can be eaten hot, cold, or room temperature.  Not a fan of warm fruit generally, we opted for room temperature.  A whipped cream was added to the top right before we were ready to eat.  The whipped cream was good but the apples failed to impress.  They were tasty before they went in the oven, Fuji's from the Farmer's Market, but they were lackluster when they came out.  I confess I did not use the entire sugar mixture, and I also did not use all the melted butter.  And for that I am glad because the apples tasted way too buttery, and in a bad way.  I'm usually quite fond of the taste of a lot of butter, but in this case it tasted not only unnecessary, but unwelcome.  I didn't finish my dessert because of this.  This recipe was a disappointment and I do not recommend it.