Apple Dumplings

This evening, Rob and I went to visit with my parents and to enjoy a delicious feast prepared by my dad.

It's weird for my dad to be the one doing the cooking.  I'm usually the one who ends up doing the cooking.  Well, I am.  So when I saw these delicious looking bits of heavenliness on Pioneer Woman's website, I knew I'd found my contribution for the evening (PS, I love Pioneer Woman.  I know that thousands of other people do, but I had to put it out there!).  Not only did they look...well, heavenly...but they also looked easy which is always good when you're cooking at someone else's house and they're already using all four burners and the microwave.  Yeah, Dad really went all out.

I enlisted some help for this little project.  I introduce to you my mom and my sister, Stephanie.

My busy bees were hard at work to make this dessert a reality.  I took pictures and screamed orders at them.  It went well.

We started off by peeling two granny smith apples.  Stephanie had never used a peeler before.  That's why my mom jumped in.

Let me say for the record that Stephanie actually does cook and makes some really good stuff.  She's an experimenter.  I guess none of those experiments ever involved a peeler.

Since she was no longer peeling, I handed her two tubes of crescent rolls and asked her to take them out and put them on a plate.  Off she went, opening tubes and pulling dough apart.

This is the face she ended up making a minute later when she couldn't figure out how to get the rolls separated from each other.

Isn't she a cutie pie?

Let me also state for the record that Stephanie is super smart and was reading when she was, like, two and a half years old.  She was just having an off night.  Don't we all sometimes?

And while we're talking about the deficiencies in my family, let me state for the record that I requested 16 apple slices from my mom.  8 from each apple.  8 x 2 = 16, right? I'm pretty sure we ended up with at least 21 of them.  And then I noticed that Stephanie was EATING THEM.  But it was okay, as my mom explained - we had plenty of slices, after all.  I felt like I was going crazy just being in the room.

So it's not just my sister.  It's my mom, too.  Which makes me wonder about my own abilities.

Moving on...

This is what we ended up with.  Don't count the number in the pan, please.

You're counting, aren't you? Even though I told you not to.

Okay, we wound up with 14.  It was supposed to be 16, yes I know.  But I'm a dope and only got the "extra big" crescent rolls, which means there's only 6 in each tube instead of 8.  So we improvised and ended up with 14 after cutting pieces off a few of the rolls.

What have I proven tonight? That the entire female side of my immediate family is missing something upstairs.

Anyway, I busied myself melting two sticks of butter and mixing in a cup and a half of sugar and a splash of vanilla, and poured this over top of the rolls in the pan.  I then poured 12 oz of Mountain Dew over top of this and sprinkled on some cinnamon.

Yes.  I said Mountain Dew back there.  I'm not entirely sure why or what it adds to the recipe, exactly.  But I'm not one to question the wisdom of folks who know better than I do.  Because I can't even buy the right number of crescent rolls.

After 40 minutes in a 350 degree oven, we had this:

And with some vanilla ice cream, it looked like this:

Just looking at this makes me drool

How did it taste? My brother said it tasted like crack.  I'm not sure what this says about my brother.  I'm hoping it doesn't say that he knows what crack tastes like.

Everyone loved them, even my dad and he's not a dessert guy.  Which is a pity, but then again that always leaves more for us.  My mom even took some to a neighbor's house.  However, now that I think about it that could be taken one of two ways.  I mean, if they were truly so life-changingly good, why would you want to share them? Wouldn't you want to horde them for yourself? Maybe I'm just a horrible, selfish person.

Wow, I'm learning so much about myself tonight.  This is better than therapy.

What did I think of them? Words haven't been invented yet to express how wonderful they are. They're so delicious and so sinful and so darn EASY! Which also makes them terribly dangerous because, seriously, who can't pull this off? Multiple times a week? Even daily?

Even my family could make them happen, and as we learned over the course of this post...we're not completely with it.  So there you go.

Yes.  My mother has apple peels up her nose.  We're just class personified.

Linking to:

A Soft Place To Land - DIY Day

  Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday