When In Doubt, Add Cheese

 
Apple pie is a beautiful thing.  It's simple, delicious, and comforting.  I had thought nothing could improve upon it until a few months ago when a friend asked me if I'd ever put a, get this, slice of cheddar cheese on a piece of warm apple pie.

Suddenly my whole life was thrown into question. Why had I not thought of this?  Had my then 26 years of life without cheese on my pie meant that those years had no meaning?  The answer was yes and I intended to change that.  To do this, I took a few simple, important steps;

1. Buy a shitload of apples
2. Buy a brick of cheese
3. Invite that creepy friend over to eat the scraps
4. Make
5. Nosh

Steps one and two were easy enough.  Who doesn't love to buy copious amounts of fruit and cheese?  No really, who?

My boyfriend and I then took on step three, which was harder than you'd think.  The poor guy was in the middle of writing his dissertation and it took substantial effort to tear him away from it.  Baked goods are usually what persuades him in the end.  

Look at how happy he is by all those apple peels.  I find his love of them to be amusing and very peculiar.  At least it means I don't have to waste them!

Step four sucked.  It really did and here's why.  I followed a recipe that involved me grating the cheese and working it into the dough.  This seemed logically sound at first, but when it came to rolling it out, I broke into a sweat in the middle of March trying to get this stuff flat.  It was rubbery and would pull back after lifting the pin.  In the future, I'll sprinkle cheese on the bottom inside of the crust and on the top of the outside.

 I was really pissed when I took this picture.  The rolling was really difficult, but also the dough was so thick that actually making the cute little apple pies proved to be far too much of a challenge.  With muffin cups being the size that they are and the cheese making this dough very thick, I was left omitting the top crust on a few of them during some flirtations with rage quit.  Here is a picture of what those looked like:

That's also my hand.  Now you know what that looks like.

All in all this was a yummy recipe, but in the future I'll sprinkle the pies with cheese when they're about half way done.  I might just do that with apple pie in general because after all, everything is better with cheese.