The Regency Kitchen – Easy Apple Dumplings

After the surprising success of our first attempt at Regency cooking, we decided to venture back into the kitchen. This recipe for apple dumplings comes from The Experienced English Housekeeper,1789.
Ingredients
For making the pastry you can either use these ingredients or buy pastry sheets.

8 oz (250g) flour, 1 egg yolk, 4 oz (125g) butter, or butter and lard, A pinch of salt.
4 good eating apples. Cream, or custard to serve. We used vanilla custard.
4 tsp marmadale, or sultanas, or jam or sugar and cinnamon. We used sultanas and cinnamon in one dumpling and blackberry conserve in the others. You could use any sort of sweet filing.

Method.
Preheat the oven to 400F/200C/Gas Mark 6. Make the pastry or get
the frozen pastry sheets out of the freezer. Divide the pastry into 4 equal portions and roll them out thin. This is why I used pastry sheets.
Peel and core the apples. If you don’t have an apple corer, you
could cut the apple in half, cut out the seeds etc and then put the apple
together again when you wrap the pastry around it. I did try to core the first apple with a sharp knife but made such a mess that only 3 apples made it into the oven.

Lay each apple on the pastry, allowing the pastry to come up a little more than halfway up the apple. Put the filing inside the apple. Cut a small square of pastry to go over the top. I smoothed the pastry joins etc with a little warm water and clean fingers. The leaves and worm were an added decoration.
Spray an oven tray with some baking spray and a little on the top
of the pastry to help it brown. Bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes and serve hot.