Two Core Techniques That Keep On Giving

You'll want to make this dessert regardless

Hello FP’s!
Back in November, I published Caramel Apples Under a Cheddar Roof in advance of the video coming out, and lots of you made it during the holidays. That gave me joy!
Today the video is live, so you can see me make it step by step. Hopefully that will be the kick in the caboose for everybody else to try it, because this is really a very fun dessert to make and the payoff is huge. Also: desserts perform notoriously poorly on the channel and it drives me crazy. A normal video person would simply stop posting content that under indexes, but I am so stubborn and so attached to my sweets recipes. Please validate my poor business decisions by giving the video a view and a thumb’s up.
More importantly: make the recipe. This creation came out of my cast-iron skillet series on Patreon, and I developed Caramel Apples Under a Cheddar Roof to illustrate the performance range of cast iron cookware—you can sear, you can fry, you can bake! Many cooks don’t bake because they don’t want to invest in the equipment—pie plates and cake pans and so on. My goal was to convert one or two with a cobbler recipe that calls for cast-iron and can be made without any other typical “dessert” tools.
Beyond the buttery, tender but crisp topping and jewel-toned caramel apples, there are a couple technical takeaways that transcend this recipe. Once you understand what’s happening, you’ll be able to apply it to many other bakes and cakes. Let’s get into it.

Hard Sell on Caramel

My very first very bad burn happened while making caramel in cooking school, and I’ve got a still-visible half-inch scar shaped vaguely like Jamaica.