French Apple Pie

Ingredients:

It was another rainy cold dark Sunday in Switzerland, perfect to bake some yummy pie for the office!

This is supposed to be a French style apple pie, although I don't know its French name. I got the recipe by browsing German recipe sites and they all call it "Apple pie a la Bretagne" There are many French apple pie recipes all over the internet, so it might very well be a true French recipe! After all it has Calvados in it. It's a very moist and not overly sweet or heavy cake with a lot of apple flavor, and it is super simple to prepare.

French Apple Pie
150g butter (3/4 cup)
4 eggs
About 1 Tbsp vanilla sugar
1 pinch salt
1 pinch baking powder
150g flour (roughly 1 1/2 cups)
150g sugar (white or brown) (about 1 1/3 cups)
500g apples (a sweet sort, I picked Golden Delicious apples) (Roughly 1 lb of apples)
some powdered sugar
2cl (about 4 teaspoons) Calvados (or Apple Brandy. You can leave out the Calvados if you don't have any).

Step 1:

Melt the butter, let it cool down a bit while you peel your apples, cut them in quarters and cut the center out.

Put your sugar, eggs, vanilla sugar, butter, salt and calvados in a big bowl and mix it until it's foamy.

Step 2:

Next, slice your apples into thin slices, like this:

Step 3:

Pour the flour and the pinch of baking powder into your egg, sugar, and butter mixture and mix it up until it's smooth.

Then put about 4/5th of your apples in there, and gently mix it up until all slices are covered in batter.

Grease a round cake pan (medium sized) and pour everything into it, smooth it out. Remember the 1/5th of apple slices you have left over? Grab them and try to arrange them nicely on top of the batter. (As you can see, I tried to arrange them and failed!)

Bake the French apple pie around 200°C (395°F) on the lowest level in your oven for about 50 minutes. Please check on the pie regularly, and at around 35-40 minutes, if you see the top getting brown, cover it up with foil and finish baking.

Step 4:

This is what the French apple pie looks like fresh out of the oven!

Step 5:

Let the French apple pie cool off for a while, and then dust the powdered sugar over the pie!

Step 6:

This is what a slice of French apple pie looks like, the apples create layers in the cake and it's really moist and has a lot of apple flavor!