Mountain Dew Apple Dumplings

These look, smell, and taste amazing! They're also dead simple to make. I made them for the first time this past Friday in fact. My coworker gave me this recipe to try out because she knew us foodies were going to cook for the rest of the hackerspace.

What you need:

• 3 Granny Smith apples
• 2 8-count cans of crescent roll dough
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1.5 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 12-ounce can Mountain Dew soda

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350 and spray a 13x9 pan. (I used a nonstick pan so I didn't bother spraying)

2. Peel and core the apples and cut them into 6 slices each. The peeling is important as I left one unpeeled (just to see what'd happen) and the skin got leathery? It didn't taste bad, it just didn't cut easily.

3. Take a triangle of the crescent roll dough and roll a slice into it. Then put the little roll into the pan. Extra apples can be put to the side (or immediately consumed :D).You'll have 16 of the crescent roll dough triangles to use.

4. Put them into the oven for 10 minutes. Most folks will say to pour the sauce on, then stick them in the oven, but letting them bake for 10 minutes first not only allows you time to make the sauce, but also makes the crescent dough start to bake so it doesn't get all doughy on the top where you want the dumpling to be crunchy!

5. Melt the butter! Once the butter's melted, take it off heat and mix the sugar and cinnamon in. I mixed it very well, but you don't have to. If you do, you get an even coating, and if you don't, you get a crunchy, sugary coating on the dumplings. Also, I used brown sugar, but I've seen recipes that let you use normal white sugar as well.

6. Once the 10 minutes are up, open the oven door, and pour the mixture evenly on the apple dumplings. I used a spoon to make sure each dumpling got at least a couple of spoonfuls. Then pour the can of Mountain Dew around the outside.

7. Let it bake for another 35 minutes. Once that's done, serve them warm with vanilla ice cream!! You may still see the Mountain Dew sloshing around on the bottom, but as the pan cools, the dumplings themselves will soak all of that up. I didn't worry too much about it, in other words :p

Note. The other option is to do it like most everyone else does it, and after step 3, go to step 5, and then bake for 45 minutes. Either way will be very tasty!