We all know that air fryers are great at making chips and lots of other savoury dishes too, but if, like me, you’ve ever looked for sweet things to make in an air fryer, you’ll like this dessert I invented.
I searched around for a recipe knowing that I wanted to use the air fryer to make a crisp pastry coating around an apple and custard filling. I couldn’t find what I was looking for so I had to make it up myself instead!
I’m not a food blogger, so you’ll have to excuse my fairly homemade looking photographs, but let me assure you that this air fryer dessert I invented got the tick of approval from the whole family.
This dessert is easy to make – you just need some (store bought) puff pastry, some tinned apple (or stewed fruit), a shake of cinnamon and some custard.
I made my own custard in the old fashioned way with custard powder, milk and sugar on the stovetop, but you could even use store bought custard for this if you prefer.
While the custard is cooling, cut a sheet of puff pastry into four squares – I use a pizza cutter wheel for this, but you could just use a sharp knife if you prefer.
For the fruit part of the filling you could really use any tinned or stewed fruit you like. I had a can of apple pie filling that needed using up which is how I came to invent these little apple and custard pies, but they’d also be delicious made with tinned pears or even apricots.
The tip here is to not put too much fruit on the pastry – as tempting as it is to make it nice and full, you want to make sure you’ve got enough pastry to fully wrap up the filling before you cook it.
I sprinkled some cinnamon on top because apple and cinnamon go so well together – if you were using tinned or stewed apricots you would probably skip this step.
Add a dollop of custard to each pile of fruit – a dollop is the technical term for a spoonful or so (!) keeping in mind not to overflow your pastry squares.
Then fold them over corner to corner to make a triangle shape – remember how I said I wasn’t a food blogger?
This is evidenced here! But, don’t worry if they don’t look perfect (like mine), they’re going to turn out great!
While you’re doing this prep, your air fryer can be preheating and getting ready to cook. Some of you may know that I’m the proud owner of an Innsky air fryer which has a nice and easy pre-heating function – push the preheat button and my air fryer will warm up for 5 minutes.
Once the air fryer is preheated, I like to put a layer of baking paper in the base – yes, you can safely use baking paper in an air fryer – anything you can use in your oven can be used in your air fryer.
I don’t use paper for most things I cook in the air fryer but, when there’s a chance of the pastry getting stuck and/or my custard filling spilling out, I feel better knowing that it’s on baking paper so cleaning up will be very easy!
Cook them for about 10 minutes at 180℃ then turn them over (they are “turnovers” after all!) and give them another 5 minutes or so on the other side.
They will come out looking golden and crispy and, frankly quite amazing for something you have just thrown together and cooked in your air fryer!
Make them a little bit fancy by sprinkling with some icing sugar:
Serve with a dollop of ice cream – just delicious!
So, if you only use your air fryer for vegetables and savoury dishes, it’s time to put it to work on desserts too!
If you have a try of my apple and custard turnovers/mini pies, let me know what you thought – pretty tasty, right?
1 Comment
Simple and delicious. I’m about to make them for the 2nd time. I’m catering for 10 men on a mine site and they were an bit hit left over in their lunch packs the following day.