German Apple Pie
Another family favorite, this German apple pie is in high demand at our house. It's so good and easy to put together. Alone this week we've made it three times for breakfast and afternoon coffee /tea and it disappeared so quickly.
Servings: 12 Servings
Equipment
- 26 cm (10 inch) spring-form (or cake tin with removable base)
Ingredients
For the pie crust
- 300 g (2 ½ cups) plain flour/ all purpose flour plus extra for dusting
- 150 g (5.3 oz) margarine
- 125 g (½ cup + 2 tablespoons) sugar
- 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar SEE NOTES
- 1 medium egg
- a pinch of salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
For the apple filling
- 5 medium apples
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 tablespoon freshly pressed lemon juice
Instructions
- In a bowl combine sugar, margarine, the egg, flour, baking powder, a pinch of salt and vanilla sugar/ extract. Using your hands mix all the ingredients together to form a firm dough. divide the cake base into 2 doughs: 2/3 and 1/3.
- Place the 2/3 dough into the prepared cake tin. Using your hands, press the cake base until the bottom of the cake tin is covered. Make the dough a bit high on the sides as well and set aside. Keep the remaining dough for later.
- Next, preheat the oven to 180 ° C (360 °F), with both top and bottom heat. Then Peel the apples, remove the core and cut into slices. Put the apples in a bowl and add sugar, freshly squeezed lemon juice and cinnamon and mix well.
- Fill the cake base with the prepared apple filling. Now dust your hands with flour and divide the remaining dough into 10 to 12 equal sized dough balls.
- Roll each mini dough ball between your hands to form a rope. Flatten each dough rope with your dusted fingers and arrange it over the filling to create a grid pattern and bake for 60 minutes.* If you don't want to flatten the pie top dough with your fingers, simply dust a working surface with flour and roll out it out with the rolling pin. Then cut the rolled out dough into strips and place the strips on top pressing the edge firmly and bake.
- Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool for a few minutes. Then remove it from the cake tin. Serve your apple pie with a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream, with whipped cream, dust it with icing sugar or eat it just like that. Enjoy!
Notes
- I've also made with recipe with butter instead of margarine, and it turned out well, will a nicely buttery flavor. So feel free to replace margarine with butter.
- * Vanilla: This recipe calls for vanilla sugar, but feel free to use, about 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Just increase the amount of regular sugar with 1 tablespoon if you’re using vanilla extract.