Apple butter and more delicious pastry

I had a lot of pastry to use up as I wanted to compare butter-made and margarine-made pastry.  I made a lot of Kransky rolls for a working bee at my daughter's creche, as well as a bacon and egg pie for dinner.  But I had a couple of pieces left over, and I wanted to try a technique I'd seen in an old kid's party book and then at a mid-winter Christmas party.  My friend has written out the technique in her blog (check out the choc-pot recipe as well). I felt like making a sweet version, so thought that it was a good opportunity to use the Apple Butter I made earlier in the year.

These were really nice - kind of a lollipop apple pie!

I first heard about apple butter on a friend's facebook page.  There was a lot of jam making at the start of the year and I was fortunate to be given two delicious jams from my friend - a rhubarb and ginger (perfect with pork) and a rose petal jam.  I saw her and a friend have a conversation about apple butter, and while I was initially focused on crabapple jam from my garden, I really wanted to make some apple butter.  One rainy day I went to Moore Wilson's and bought a whole heap of Granny Smith Apples and Apple Cider.

This is the kind of recipe that you want when you have lots of little bits of time throughout the day.  In my case, the baby was asleep and I needed to clean the kitchen so I was able to keep giving this the small amounts of attention required.  This is the recipe that I was recommended: Apple Butter  There is no actual butter in the recipe, just a very delicious, concentrated apple flavour.  The person who passed it on to me recommended omitting the lemon.  I tried it with lemon since it was my first batch.  There is a lemon after taste - I like it, but could equally do without it.  I think the lemon may help to make it better for both savoury and sweet recipes.  I have put little dollops of this in when cooking pork - it helps give a rich apple flavour and glazes the sauce beautifully.