Skip to main content
Dessert

Baked Apples

Apples are baked with sugar, cloves, cinnamon, butter, and a hot water syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Baked Apples

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and core the apples.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the cavities with sugar, one clove, a pinch of cinnamon, and a bit of butter.

  2. Pour a syrup of hot water and honey or sugar around the apples.

  3. Bake carefully until tender.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Apple + honeytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Cinnamon + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the main body that softens and turns tender as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling caramelise slightly at the edges.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the spices and moistening the filling.
Honey or sugar
Sweetens the syrup, which bathes the apples and adds gloss and flavour.

The step that matters

Bake carefully until tender. Apples can split or collapse if baked too hot or too long. Gentle heat lets the flesh soften evenly while it holds its shape, so check for tenderness with a knife rather than relying on time alone.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, cinnamon, butter, honey):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cinnamon, butter, honey. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More baked apples recipes

with Wine 10with Cream 7with Butter 5with Meringue 5with Rice 5with Syrup 5 See all 248 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes