Appelflappen

The last thing many Dutch kitchens bake before the year turns is not grand. It is a square of bladerdeeg, laminated puff pastry, folded over apple and cinnamon into a triangle that looks like it learned geometry from a hungry child. This is proper. Appelflappen belong to Oudejaarsavond, New Year's Eve, where they sit beside oliebollen with less noise and often better manners.

The name already tells you the whole trick. Appel is apple. Flap is the fold, the loose little word for a pastry turned over on itself. No mystery dragged in by the ankles. But let me tell you a secret: the modesty is the point. Dutch festive baking often hides its extravagance in plain clothes, and here the treasure is spice cargo made household: cinnamon in the apple, sugar on the crust, butter between the pastry layers doing the work without making speeches.

What matters is restraint. Cut the apple small so it softens before the pastry overbakes, use a tart apple because sugar needs an argument, and seal the triangle well enough that the juices stay mostly inside. Mostly. A little syrup at the edge is not failure, it's evidence. Hou het altijd simpel, always keep it simple: good puff pastry, firm apple, cinnamon, a hot oven, and a table where the first crumbs fall before midnight.