Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients:

• 5 medium size apples
• Sugar to taste
• 1 stick (4oz) of margarine for baking or butter, cold
• 1.5 cups of all purpose flour plus a bit more for dusting
• 1/2 – 3/4 of kefir or not so thick sour cream, cold
• 1/2 tsp of baking powder

How to prepare, step-by-step:

1. Prepare ingredients: amount of kefir or sour cream will depend on its thickness:

   

2. Start off by preparing dough. Pour 1.5 cups of flour to a mixing bowl, add cold margarine or butter:

   

3. Add baking powder:

   

4. Using fork of pair of knives (or something more modern like a food processor) start working margarine into flour:

   

5. Until you coarse crumbles, try to work fast:

   

6. Add half cup of cold kefir (or thin sour cream if you use it):

   

7. And mix it in until you get homogeneous and pretty thick butter (if kefir is too thick you may need to use a bit more of it to get dough stick together):

   

8. Form dough into dense ball and put to freezer for 40-50 mins:

   

9. About 15 mins before dough time in freezer is up, start warming up oven to 355F and start preparing apples. Remove apple cores and peel skin of them:

   

10. Then slice each of them in half across the core:

    

11. Get dough from the freezer and split it into 10 more or less equal size pieces:

    

12. Roll one of them into circle just big enough to cover an apple half:

    

13. Arrange apple half in the middle of it:

    

14. Pour about half teaspoon of sugar to the hole in the middle of the apple (or more or less to taste):

    

15. Then start folding the dough around apple half and securing edges around apple hole:

    

16. You will get a dumpling looking like this:

    

17. Work through remaining dough pieces and apple halves; move assembled dumplings to a baking sheet lined up with parchment paper:

    

18. Put baking sheet to the warmed up oven for about 40-45 mins:

    

19. Once dough is lightly colored and/or apples are soft to your liking, remove sheet from the oven; move dumplings to a plate:

    

Baked apple dumplings taste best warm, they may benefit of a scoop of ice cream; but cooled down ones are good too.