Good afternoon DIY,
Today I'm hitting you with, well, yet another dessert profile recipe. However, this time, I decided to try something that would allow me to experiment with a profile other than ice cream/creams in general.
Apple Crisp.
Yes, one of my absolute favourite desserts ever. Basically any sort of fruit dessert catches my interest, as I'm sure you can tell by my recipes, but apple based desserts stand at the top for me. Apple pie, drunken apples, and above all, delicious apple crisp.
Keep in mind, this is very much a work in progress, but it seems like everyone appreciates that I post my recipes as version posts until they are complete. So I figured I'll do it with this one as well (save for the ACTUAL version 1 attempt, which was way off base).
As always, flavour notes, ratio, and steep time posted below the recipe.
Apple Crispy version 1 Recipe
- FA Fuji at 3.75%
- TFA Apple Pie at 1.5%
- FA Apple Pie at 2%
- FA Cookie at 0.75%
- INW Biscuit at 0.5%
- FA Joy at 0.5%
- CAP Sugar Cookie at 3.5%
- TFA Cinnamon Sugar Cookie at 0.75%
- FA Caramel at 2%
- FA Meringue at 0.75%
Flavour Notes
FA Fuji - I honestly cannot say enough good things about this flavour. If you do not have it in your arsenal, I highly suggest getting it. It is the best apple concentrate I've tried, and it really is a complex flavour. In my opinion, it tastes like a honeycrisp apple and a granny smith apple had a lovechild. You get all of the sweet and crisp elements from the honeycrisp, but the in your face bite from a granny smith. Very balanced, and perfect in this recipe. 3.75% is a little high for this flavour, but it does tend to mute itself with steeping, and this recipe needs a few days to really merge the flavours together. At 3.75%, you get a nice bold flavour if you want to shake and vape (honestly one of the most flavourful vapes I've had in a long while), but with about 2 days of steeping, the Fuji still gives you a nice kick, but the other flavours come out to play.
TFA Apple Pie - still deciding on whether or not this particular flavour is actually doing much for the recipe. My intent here was to use TFA's Apple Pie to help create that sort of gelatinous, sweet, apple pie filling you want in an apple crisp. It seems to fall a little short. While it helps tame the Fuji just enough, I think I can do better in this recipe.
FA Apple Pie/FA Cookie/INW Biscuit - the "crumbles." This is the part of the recipe I am truly most proud of. In some initial tests to see what would work in this recipe, I found that FA Apple Pie had the flavour base I was looking for, while FA Cookie provided a little bit of a crumbly sweet element, and INW Biscuit dried it all up. At these percentages, it's a perfect jumping off point to either boost the crumble flavour, set them back a bit, or even turn around and make a sort of "Apple Cookie" recipe.
CAP Sugar Cookie - while attempting to avoid any cream flavours in this recipe as a crutch to give the fruits something to layer on top of, I immediately grabbed my bottle of CAP Sugar Cookie. This flavour is currently one of my favourites. It's dense and sweet, with just a little bit of cake mouthfeel to it. But it's also very forgiving. You can push it up to 3, 4, and even 5% in recipes and it still just sits in the background. It doesn't fight to take the spotlight in the way that flavours like VBIC, Sweet Cream, and Vanilla Custard do. Sugar Cookie just sits and lets the other flavours sort of bind to it, giving those flavours a nice softness to them. In instances like the intensity of FA Fuji, CAP Sugar Cookie allows it to shine, but absorbs just a bit of that in your face bite.
FA Joy/TFA Cinnamon Sugar Cookie - these two play very nicely with each other. If you have Joy, you understand how crucial it is in bakery type recipes. It's similar to Torrone, in my opinion, in that it is subtle and complex all at the same time. I notice a bit of a cinnamon sugar sweetness from Joy, so pairing it with TFA CSC was a no brainer for me. Be careful with TFA CSC though, getting anywhere above 1.5% starts tasting funky and unpleasant. At 0.75, it just adds a bit more cinnamon bite to the recipe.
FA Caramel/FA Meringue - Meringue. Duh. While a traditional apple crisp doesn't necessarily have any sort of powdered sugar element to it, the meringue is here to just boost the natural sweetness of the fruit elements, while providing a little extra balance during steeping. FA Caramel was sort of an afterthought, but I'm really just struggling to ever notice it in my recipes.
Ratio/Steep Time/Possible V2 Changes - as always, I mix at 70VG/30PG and it works best for me. I bet you could probably boost it to 80VG and it would mute the Fuji a little bit as a shake and vape. But I'm not sure. As for steep time, I can't say enough how happy I am with it just as a shake and vape. You get a lovely inhale of apple pie flavours (cinnamon, apple, sugar) with the mouthfeel of the crumbles. And the exhale is just in your face flavour. That Fuji shines so nicely on the exhale, and I personally like that. After an overnight steep, you start to notice a little more of the bakery elements, which helps prevent Fuji from being the only thing you taste. Two days is probably the longest you'll have to wait for the majority of flavour changes to take shape.
Finally, possible changes. I already know that I'm going to remove FA Caramel from this mix and replace it with TFA Brown Sugar. I have been loving Brown Sugar lately in my recipes because of the aftertaste and mouthfeel it provides. I am kinda kicking myself for not immediately trying to pair that with the "crumble" part of the recipe. It's exactly what it needs to pull that part together.
I'm still trying to figure out how to accomplish that sort of gelatinous apple filling part of the apple crisp. I was thinking maybe a 1:1 mix of Sweet Cream and EM to just boost the sugary nature of a "pie filling," but I really don't want it to become a "creamy" vape. But at a low enough percentage, it might work due to the heavy handedness of the cookie elements. We'll see.
So, with all that being said, mix it up and let me know what you think! I'll be working on this one for a while now until I get the necessary ingredients to finally get my Drunken Pears to a point of feeling 100% complete.
Cheers!
You are correct about tfa apple pie, it is really weak. I am replacing it with FA Liquid Amber at the same %. Besides that this looks pretty solid!
Will prob omit the cookie too. The FA Apple Pie and biscuit should take care of that part.
Two comments (they gon ask if I can play this shit baaack to back), about FA Liquid Amber, must be the missing piece. Glad to have posted this BEFORE placing my next flavour order. Definitely snagging that one. Thanks!
It turns fuji into a baked apple. A few days aging really makes that more noticeable. I'm also gonna make a second version, where I add a little TFA VBIC. I have had some luck with a similar profile.
Seeing your edit, yeah, the cookie isn't entirely necessary to create the crumbly bits. I just liked the added sense of dryness it provides. I think I'll be happy with omitting it once I find where I want TFA Brown Sugar to sit, percentage-wise.
And yeah! What I will love most about this recipe once I get it closer to perfect is that it should be versatile. Could turn it into Peach Cobbler, Apple Crisp a la mode, or even just tweak percentages to personal taste.
So this looks like a much more refined version of what I'm vaping right now. Which is basically an Apple-cookie-sugar ... thing. I don't have very many total flavors yet so I just sort looked for an apple based recipe on ELR (by /u/notcharlesmanson/ I believe) and changed it to fit what I had.
My question is, what in this recipe does the most to mellow out Fuji? I'm down to 2% in this iteration of my recipe and it's still SO strong, even after a week steep.
From what I'm noticing by vaping it, it seems like the use of CAP Sugar Cookie and INW Biscuit are doing the best job at helping bring that intensity from Fuji down to something a little more comfortable.
However, I personally like how in your face Fuji is, but I definitely notice it being much more mellow in here than in my flavour tests on Fuji as a standalone flavour. Hope that helps.
Also, if you wanna bring it down a bit, about 1% of CAP Marshmallow should give you some creamy sweetness that should help mute Fuji in a day or so. I've found that flavour to really mute a lot of fruit flavours.
Thank you, that helps a lot. I'm really just starting to make things by modifying existing recipes, up til now I've sort of followed recipes exactly (with maybe minor tweaks). I guess I don't really like the idea of intentionally muting the flavor out, it feels like cheating(?). I sort of want there to be just the right amount there to be part of the main profile, without pushing everything else into the background. Fuji is such a bully. Reading posts talking about top notes, bottom notes, main body flavors, etc makes me laugh, I keep thinking, what if you have a flavor that tries to do it all, lol.
Saving this! Thanks for all the notes, can't wait to mix this up. I love apple recipes, and make Apple Crisp from scratch often as soon as Autumn hits.
Plus I've been looking for something to break the stranglehold that /u/returnity's Cinapple Fritter has on my psyche, even if only for a second.
One thing jumped out at me, though: "I'm still trying to figure out how to accomplish that sort of gelatinous apple filling part of the apple crisp."
Would 0.25% FA Liquid Amber be a good idea? I don't think it would be enough to drag it into cider/fermented territory, but, I used it with some berries recently to jelly-up a jelly doughnut variation on Bronuts and it worked out fairly well.
Just a thought, maybe someone else can weigh in. And thanks for the post!
You're too kind! I love that recipe to death too, it's one of my better accomplishments in DIY. I think Liquid Amber is a great suggestion, it works perfectly for that kind of effect. /u/Botboy141 turned me on to that originally -- I've never tried it on the Cinapple Fritter recipe because I had the gooey-cinnamon-apple-filling down pretty solidly there with the flavor combination I'd put together, but I think that's your best bet here.
Thanks for the kind words! I think this will be a perfect autumn vape once I get it perfected!
As for what you said, FA Liquid Amber seems to be the consensus on what to use as that gelatinous element. Seems like your suggestion is definitely valid, for its the third one I've had to implement that flavour into the recipe. Cheers, and thanks for the suggestion :)
This recipe looks awesome! Sadly, I don't have all the flavors, so I'm going to make a few subs:
*FA Fuji at 3.75%
*~~TFA Apple Pie at 1.5%~~
*FA Liquid Amber at 0.5%
*FA Apple Pie at 2%
*FA Cookie at 0.75%
*INW Biscuit at 0.5%
*FA Joy at 0.5%
*CAP Sugar Cookie at 3.5%
*~~TFA Cinnamon Sugar Cookie at 0.75%~~
*Rich Cinnamon at 0.16%
*~~FA Caramel at 2%~~
*TFA Brown Sugar at 0.75%
*FA Meringue at 0.75%
I'm probably a detractor as well about the FA Caramel. I just... don't like it in anything I put it in. I ended up tossing the bottle when I last did a clean out of my FW offenders.
I'll let you know how it goes!
Edit: Bullets
Edit 2: Mixed and steeping. Also, updated rich cinnamon. I'll let you know in a day or 2. :)
Your substitutions are essentially the same ones I'm gonna make once I get Liquid Amber! I like what cinnamon sugar cookie does to the recipe, but I'll bet rich cinnamon will accomplish the same thing, probably to an even greater extent.
I look forward to your notes on it :)
Damn! It's good. With 0.5% liquid amber it is gooey. The Rich Cinnamon is definitely apparent, even at 1 drop per 15ml. The crumble portion is perfect IMO. It is perfectly sweet. A little harsh though. I think it will do even better with a 2 week steep but this 15ml will not make it another day. I'm curious is a small amount of CAP Vanilla Whipped Cream will work here too. Maybe 1% er so to help soften it a little and add some more vanilla without creating a creamy taste.
Thanks for the recipe. I'll try it with FW Dutch Applie Pie instead of TFA Apple Pie and TFA Cinnamon Sugar Cookie, I've only just smelled it from the bottle but I think it should take care of that part. I'm thinking 2%. I'll also lower Fuji and Caramel to 2.5% and 1% respectively.
I would use TFA Brown Sugar in Place of FA Meringue for darker sweetness in this. And Maybe lower the caramel to 1% and use Rich Cinnamon FLV instead of TFA CSC. I think Maybe even FW Salted Caramel might go great in an apple recipe with Maybe 2-3% of that, backed by FA Caramel or TFA Brown Sugar.
I've never used Fuji in a mix higher than 3%, and in single flavor testing at 4% it got real funky for me. I might have to try this recipe out for the sake of seeing how I like Fuji that high in a mix. As always Matt thanks for pushing out all of these great ideas, you've been killin the game lately