New Year's Flambee: or, Here comes 2026!

Did 2025 make anyone else want to burn things?

New Year's Flambee Large-sized tart baking apples (one per serving) Whole-berry cranberry sauce Sugar for sprinkling About 1 tablespoon of whiskey per apple Whiskey butter (recipe follows) Heat oven to 350°. Wash, pare, and core baking apples (one per serving). Fill the holes with whole-berry cranberry sauce. Place the apples in a baking dish, then pour a little cold water at the bottom of it. (Use a baking dish that looks nice enough to bring to the table, if you have one.) Sprinkle the apples generously with sugar. Then bake until tender, about 40 minutes. While they're baking, make the whiskey butter. Serve the apples while still warm. When serving them, pour about a tablespoon of whiskey over each one. Then ignite the apples. Serve with Whiskey Butter.      Whiskey Butter: 2 cups sifted powdered sugar (10 oz by weight) ½ cup butter, softened  ½ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt (omit if using salted butter) 2 tbsp whiskey Cream the sugar, butter, nutmeg, and salt. Beat until smooth. Then gradually beat in the whiskey. Note: We changed the main ingredients to use what we already had on hand. If you want to follow the original recipe: use mincemeat instead of cranberries, and apple brandy instead of whiskey (both in the butter and for pouring over the apples to ignite). Omit the nutmeg from the brandy butter. Warning! NEVER pour liquor right from the bottle onto flaming food! The fire will travel up the pouring stream and go into the bottle. Then, the bottle will blow up in your hand. If you must pour additional liquor after you've lit the food, pour it from a ladle or a large serving spoon, and be sure you don't have anything flammable nearby (including any hanging holiday decorations suspended from the ceiling above). Adapted from: Mrs. Florence Kummerer, 511 Chestnut Street, Pottstown, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

The newspaper ran this on January 10, which is a little late for your New Year's party (unless you stashed the clipping away for a whole year). But I guess it's easy to still be optimistic about the upcoming year when you're only ten days into it. The recipe seems like something you'd make to lighten the mood as the very last holiday leftovers are finally exhausted and you have to go back to normal food.

Recipe Exchange; Philadelphia Inquirer; page 11; January 10, 1936

Igniting food goes in and out of style depending on the decade, but I didn't think I'd see it pop up in the middle of the Depression. (Or at least, not among home recipes). 

This recipe's title made me think this would either demand a lot of time or a lot of grocery money. But this is a pretty simple dessert-- aside from the part where you set it on fire. But enough about that. Let's burn some apples.

The recipe calls for putting mincemeat in the apples. I thought I would grab a jar of it on a post-holiday discount, but apparently they purge the stuff once Christmas is behind us. And I don't mean pushing it to some clearance corner. There was no mincemeat among the piles of cookie mix and canned pumpkin. Nor was there any mincemeat among the canned pie fillings on the baking aisle. I asked multiple employees where the last remaining jar of mincemeat might be, checked every possible section of the store, and ultimately left empty-handed.

I thought about some raisins into a pot with brown sugar and boiling them into a quick sorta-mincemeat, but then I decided I was making way too much work. We would put cranberry salad (of which we have a lot) in the apples instead. I'm sure Mrs. Florence Kummerer would understand if I changed her ingredients to match what was already in the house.

While we were economizing, I chose not to purchase any brandy for the recipe. I know mini-bottles tend to be forgettably cheap, but I still have a partial bottle of whiskey from my brother's wedding. (That wedding was five years ago) Also, I just don't like going to liquor stores. And really, do whiskey and brandy taste any different after you've burned them away?

Now that we're done (not) shopping, it was time to get out a paring knife. I've seen a lot of recipes that involve cutting out the centers of apples and then stuffing them with something, but this is the first time I've attempted it. My first attempt to cut the core out of an intact apple doesn't look to bad, does it?

I could pretend that I casually did a near-perfect job, but let's flip the apple over and see the missing chunks where the knife went the wrong way.

I sprinkled on sugar "generously" as the recipe said. Most of it fell right off. My erroneous knifework actually paid off and gave some of the sugar a perch to land on. If I bake whole apples again, I may cut notches out of the sides for this express purpose.

 

You could see why the recipe doesn't use cranberries after a few short minutes in the oven. The apples looked like they were bleeding. I may file this recipe away for next Halloween (minus the part where you set it on fire.)

The long baking time allowed me to make the "Brandy Sauce," which today is whiskey sauce due to the above-mentioned economizing. Incorrect spirits aside, our sauce was more like a frosting. I think I just accidentally made "Brandy Butter" as if I'm some British person making a Christmas pudding. Well, Mrs. Kummerer does tell us to fill the centres of the apples and not the centers of them.

I tasted a sample of our "sauce" and it was halfway to eggnog. I gave it a little nutmeg to complete the flavor, and it was absolutely delicious. One of my friends really likes eggnog (we have, like, three containers of it in the fridge because the grocery stores were getting rid of it). I might surprise them at some point with whiskey-nutmeg frosting on cookies or something.

And now, the time had finally arrived to bust out the pistol lighter. This step terrified me. I had horrible visions of the fire leaping up to the ceiling, or cracking the plate and then burning a hole in the countertop. I didn't even take this to the table because it's made of wood. The kitchen counters at least have tile on top which would buy me some time in the event that I had to wield a fire extinguisher and hope it was enough. But after about fifteen seconds of blue flames, it was all over. I turned on the lights and said "What was the point of that?"

Well, now that the fire has safely gone out, let's see what is left.

I guess you set these on fire for the spectacle because it didn't do anything else. I thought the sugar on top of the apples might get browned a bit, but you couldn't see the difference. And you really couldn't see the flames unless you turned the lights down really low, so it wasn't much a spectacle. (Hmm... dim rooms and fires on a holiday that's famous for getting drunk...)

I didn't know how you're supposed to serve brandy butter with this. The recipe calls it a sauce but it's more like extra-thick frosting. I guess you smear it on top? It did taste really nice as it melted and slid off the apples.

Aside from a brief moment when you turn dessert into a fire hazard, this is exactly what it looks like. It tastes like apples with cranberries in them. (Or mincemeat if you follow the original recipe). But you need to read all the way to the bottom of the recipe to get to the good stuff. The "brandy sauce" (or whiskey sauce if that's what you have) is merely a four-line addendum to the main attraction, but I think it might be best part.