Baked Apples with Dried Fruit

The clocks have gone back and the kitchen is the warmest room in the house again. Outside, it's dark by five. Inside, there's an oven on and something quietly bubbling in a dish, and that's usually enough.

A baked apple is almost too simple to call a recipe. You core a cooking apple, fill the hole with butter and brown sugar and whatever dried fruit is lurking at the back of the cupboard, and put it in a hot oven for half an hour. It collapses into itself. The sugar melts into the butter and the juices from the apple. The dried fruit plumps up and goes sticky. The skin splits along the score line and crinkles back on itself. None of this requires attention or skill, which is why it's the right thing to cook on an evening when you haven't got either to spare.

Use Bramleys if you can find them. They break down into something closer to a puree than a baked fruit, which is the whole point. Eating apples hold their shape and miss the trick entirely. A jug of cold double cream alongside, or custard if you're feeling generous. I wrote it down in the notebook last November: apples, cupboard fruit, the radio on. That was all it was. That was all it needed to be.