French Friday with Dorie: Rice Pudding and Caramel Apples

For this week's French Fridays with Dorie we were given cook's choice where we could select any recipe from Dorie's book, Around My French Table. Since there have been no dessert recipes for FFwDorie for the past couple of months, I decided that I wanted to make a dessert. And, since it is Thanksgiving week and after making a very involved cake recipe last week, I decided that I wanted a simple dessert and so I selected Dorie's rice pudding with caramel apples.

I still had some leftover rice from the FFwD stuffed peppers I made a few months ago, so I was happy to see this recipe called for Arborio rice. It is an easy recipe to make, but it does require some time to cook and you need to watch the milk as it is coming to a boil. Don't walk away for a few minutes like I did because then your milk will pick that exact instant to boil over like mine did. It turned out to be okay - I just had a mess to clean up later and had a little less milk for the pudding. Once the milk boils, you turn the heat down and add the rice that you have pre-cooked for 10 minutes and 50 minutes later you have this creamy pudding.

While the pudding cools to room temperature you make the apples and caramel sauce. This is so simple to do. You put the sugar in the middle of a non-stick skillet and add a splash of lemon juice. I added some lemon juice from a meyer lemon from my little tree. Once this begins to caramelize, you add some butter, lower the heat and add some apple cider. When it boils you add the sliced apples and cook until they are tender. Then you add the heavy cream and continue to cook until the sauce turns the caramel color you want. Dorie says to cook another minute after adding the heavy cream, but it took mine about 4-5 minutes to get to the color I wanted.

Once the caramel apples cool to room temperature, you layer some of the caramel sauce along with some of the apples in the bottom of the dish and spoon some of the rice pudding over it and then top with more caramel apples. The result is a creamy caramel apple pudding that is so delicious. I am not a big fan of rice pudding, but I really enjoyed this and liked the plump Arborio rice. My husband loved it with and without the caramel apples. It is a simple, yet elegant dessert and as my son said, "A perfect finish to a meal." You can find the recipe at Epicurious.

Visit this week's French Fridays with Dorie link to see the recipes other members selected.