Toffee Apple Hand Pies for Bonfire Night: Caramelised Apple in Puff Pastry You Can Eat by the Fire

Toffee apples have long been tied to Bonfire Night, a London Walks guide to this year's fireworks reminds us, the sugar shell having once been a way of keeping autumn apples a little longer. The trouble with the original is that it is murder to eat in gloves. So this year the toffee apple is being taken apart and rebuilt in forms you can hold in one hand.

Helen Goh's miso-toffee apple hand pies, published in The Guardian on 30 October and pitched squarely at 5 November, fold a caramelised apple filling into shop-bought puff pastry. A food writer's toffee apple cookie, posted on Monday, does the same trick with brown butter and red toffee shards. TikTok trend trackers at SocialPilot list toffee apples and bonfire treats among the posts filling British feeds this week, with the bonfirenight hashtag rising.

Our version keeps the idea simple: apples cooked down in butter and brown sugar until glossy, a pinch of salt and a splash of vinegar to stop the sweetness becoming cloying, sealed in puff pastry and baked until the sugar at the edges catches. Warm from the tin, the pastry shatters and the filling tastes exactly like the fairground apple, minus the dentist.

Ingredients

Makes 8 hand pies. Total time about 1 hour 30 minutes, including 25 minutes of chilling (55 minutes preparation and chilling, 35 minutes cooking).

• 800 g firm apples, about 4 large, ideally half Bramley and half a crisp eating apple such as Braeburn (about 650 g once peeled and cored)
• 80 g light brown soft sugar
• 50 g unsalted butter
• 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon cornflour mixed with 1 tablespoon cold water
• 2 x 320 g sheets of ready-rolled all-butter puff pastry, cold
• 1 egg, beaten with a pinch of salt, for glazing
• 2 tablespoons demerara sugar, for sprinkling
• Plain flour, for dusting

Method

1. Peel, core and cut the apples into 1 cm dice. Toss them in a bowl with the brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt and leave for 20 minutes so the sugar draws out some juice.
2. Melt the butter in a wide frying pan over medium-high heat. Tip in the apples and all their juice and cook, stirring now and then, for 8 to 10 minutes until the liquid reduces to a glossy toffee coating and the apples are tender but still holding their shape.
3. Add the vinegar and vanilla, then stir in the cornflour slurry and cook for 1 minute until the syrup thickens and clings to the fruit. Spread the filling out on a plate or tray and chill until completely cold, about 25 minutes. A warm filling will melt the pastry.
4. Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan, gas 6) and line two baking trays with baking paper. Unroll one pastry sheet on a lightly floured surface and cut it into four rectangles of roughly 12 x 18 cm. Repeat with the second sheet.
5. Spoon about 2 heaped tablespoons of cold filling onto one half of each rectangle, leaving a 1.5 cm border. Brush the border with beaten egg, fold the empty half over the filling and press the edges together with your fingers, then crimp firmly with the tines of a fork dipped in flour.
6. Transfer the pies to the trays, spacing them apart, and chill for 10 minutes so the pastry firms up and holds its layers in the oven.
7. Brush the tops with beaten egg, sprinkle generously with demerara sugar and cut two short slits in each pie with a sharp knife so steam can escape.
8. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, swapping the trays halfway, until the pastry is deep golden and the sugar on top has crisped. Some filling may bubble out at the seams; that is the toffee bit.
9. Rest the pies on the trays for 5 minutes, then move to a wire rack. Serve warm, or at room temperature wrapped in paper for the walk to the fireworks.

Tips, variations and storage

If you want the miso note Goh uses, stir 20 g of white miso into the hot filling with the vanilla: it deepens the toffee flavour without tasting savoury. For a darker, treacly version closer to bonfire toffee, swap half the brown sugar for black treacle. A handful of chopped toasted pecans or hazelnuts in the filling adds crunch, and a drizzle of melted dark chocolate over the cooled pies nods to the chocolate-dipped apples on the stall.

The filling can be made two days ahead and kept covered in the fridge. The unbaked pies freeze well on a tray, then bagged, for up to a month; bake from frozen, adding about 5 minutes. Baked pies keep for two days in an airtight tin and revive in a 160C fan oven for 8 minutes. Avoid the microwave, which turns puff pastry limp.

Toffee apples on a stick will still be on sale outside the display on Thursday, and nobody is suggesting the fairground gives them up. But a pocket of warm caramel apple that survives a crowd, a cold night and a pair of gloves is the version worth baking this week.