Cream Cheese Caramel Apple Turnovers

The last week of living at my apartment, I had a bunch of random ingredients to use up: one block of cream cheese, 4 Granny Smith apples from Berkeley Bowl, three pounds of butter, not a whole lot of sugar, and caramel candies. These ingredients combined in perfect proportion to make cream cheese caramel apple turnovers. The puff pastry took the longest to make, since you have to pound out butter and dough, and refrigerate for 2 hours in between. I made a substitute in the recipe--I only had half the amount of all-purpose flour and made up the rest with cake flour, which I'm not sure affected it or not. Cake flour has lower protein content, so that means less gluten development, right?

Puff Pastry! There aren't many ingredients, but you don't want to know how many sticks of butter went into this. I got impatient refrigerating for 2 hours in between folding, so I froze the dough for 30 minutes instead. I don't recommend taking shortcuts in baking, but I had graduations to attend!



Apple-cream cheese mixture. After packing up most of my kitchen (including the Joker, my Kitchenaid stand mixer) to move out of my apartment, I had to stir things BY HAND!! I also had to dice up apples BY HAND!! Actually, I do the latter normally anyway.


These are caramel cream candies. I diced them up after unwrapping them individually. They stick to knives and are generally annoying to deal with.


Puff pastry dough, rolled out and filled with two tablespoons of apple mixture and four caramel pieces. D said they reminded him of dumplings.


Brush the dough with apple juice, pinch together, and crimp with a fork.


After freezing until firm, brush the outside with more apple juice, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and bake at 425 for 25 minutes!


Puff! Yay! This was my first time making puff pastry,and I think it went decently well. I made another batch the next day while A and V watched me whack the dough with a makeshift rolling pin (aka, the pestle part of a mortar and pestle). I'd never been so covered in flour in my life, and cleaning up my kitchen afterward was a disaster. Oh well! I think they were yummy, and the people who I gave them to thought so also. I need to restock my kitchen at home because I gave V all of my baking supplies before I moved out. Even though my kitchen at home has more space, I never bake at home. Hopefully this will change over the next year that I'm living here.