What To Do With Your Apple Bounty - Part II

A couple of summers ago, I discovered the joys of Leila Lindholm (Sweden's answer to Giada). Not only is she beautiful and unannoyingly cheerful, she cooks up real delights in the kitchen. Her baked goods are exceptional -- the custardy royalpaj [pron. "royal pie"] is a Leila specialty that takes on a number of fruits very well, and remains a favorite in my book.

Seeing as how our bag of apples didn't have a dent even after a couple of aggressive baking and snacking sessions, O and I decided to give one of Leila's pies an all-American twist (and finally finish up our apples!).

You'll want to break out your springform pan for this one!

Unfortunately, the recipe we used is in Swedish (see here). O pretty much translated/converted as we went along. Here is a crude translation I've edited from Google's program (actually it's pretty good), but no conversion from metric:

French Royalpaj (basic recipe)
Ingredients for the shortcrust pastry:
150g cold butter
4 dl wheat flour
1 / 2 dl icing sugar (=confectioner's sugar)
1 organic egg
1 tbsp cold water

Ingredients for the filling:
3 organic eggs
2 dl Kesella 10% (=quark, you can get this at your local greenmarket or substitute sour cream)
1 dl crème fraiche
1 dl sugar
100g grated almond paste (can easily be made by grinding almonds and sugar together)

Apricot Royale (we substituted apples)
1 pie

Ingredients:
1 pajskal (pie shell) of SHORTCRUST PASTRY (see basic recipe above)
1 Bet filling (see basic recipe above)
6 fresh apricots (in this case, apples)
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp sugar
2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon black cardamom seeds (the cardamom gives it its Swedish flair!)
25 g almond shavings

Do this:
1. Preheat oven of 175 degrees (C).
2. Peel and core and cut up the fruit.
3. Melt butter, sugar, cinnamon and freshly painted cardamom (ground in a mortar) in a hot frying pan and roast apricot are golden in about 3 minutes.
4. Fill pie shell to 2/3 of the filling, place the fruit with the cut surface upward. Sprinkle over almond shavings.
5. Bake far down in the oven in 30-40 minutes, until it receives a golden color.

Let me tell you, the crust was to-die-for! Not soggy on the bottom at all, either. I think the addition of an egg played a key role in its tenderness.

Oh yeah, the nearly 1.5 sticks of butter probably helped too. :P