Sift the flour, icing sugar, and add the diced butter, egg yolk, and 1tbsp of cold water into a food processor. Blitz quickly on the pulse setting until the mixture starts to bind, it shouldn’t take too long at all!
Grease & flour a deep 23-25cm tart tin – Roll the pastry mix out onto a lightly floured surface to the thickness of 1-2 £1 coin(s).
Press the pastry into the tin and trim & neaten the edges. Fill any gaps of the pastry with any excess pastry so its all covered! Refrigerate for 1/2 an hour!
Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan – cover the pastry with baking parchment and fill with baking beans/rice and bake the pastry ‘Blind’ for 15 minutes!
Remove the parchment and the beans and bake for an extra 5-10 minutes or until the pastry is cooked through and turning golden! Leave to cool in the tin.
For the Filling
Chop the peeled and cored apples into inch size pieces so they’re still reasonably sized. Add the apple to a large heavy based pan, along with the sugar, cinnamon and two tablespoons of water.
Cook the apple in the pan, whilst stiring, over a medium heat for five minutes. After the five minutes, stop stiring and add the pan lid and leave to ‘simmer’ for another five minutes.
You basically need the fruit to still have texture and firmness. If the apples are getting very soft quickly, turn the heat off and move onto the next step as you don't want it to be too liquid!
For the Assembly & Baking!
Rub together the sugar, flour and butter until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. The butter needs to be cold for it to work!
Add the apple into the pie case and carefully dollop over the caramel in small spoonfuls!
Sprinkle over the crumble mixture. Bake the pie in the oven for 25-30 minutes until the crumble mixture on top is golden!
Once baked, leave the pie to cool for about 30 minutes as its going to be very hot. Once cooled slightly, remove from the tin and enjoy warm! I add a scoop of vanilla or clotted cream ice cream… or, leave it to cool and also enjoy cold!
Notes
When buying the apples, buy above the 500g as thats the chopped and peeled weight. You need to aim for about 650-750g of apples, to make sure that its enough!
As you are cooking the fruit in a pan, it really can vary in time. Other hobs/heats could take a full 10 minutes longer than mine for example so keep an eye on it!
I reeeeally would recommend using COOKING apples for this rather than regular eating apples because of the length of time the cake is baking for. If you used regular apples, there is a chance they’d turn to mush, and then the cake wouldn’t bake well either. The lovely bright green cooking apples are the ones you’re after!
I used Carnations caramel for the caramel!
This dessert will last in the fridge for up to 3 days, but is best on the day of baking!
RECIPE UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2019
The original recipe was very similar, just a different method.
In the original I used 300g apples, thinly sliced and dried between paper towels to reduce liquid.
And the recipe used 3tbsp cornflour, mixed in with 75g brown sugar and the apples, layered onto the pie base.