Oven Baked Apples with Coconut, Maple Syrup, and Lime

I saw this on an old episode of TLC's Take Home Chef and it sounded so unique that I had to try it out! Here's what you'll need:

1/2 c sugar
1/4 c lime juice (2 limes, fresh is better!)
2/3 c butter
1/2 c maple syrup
2 c coconut
4 Granny Smith Apples
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F

The first thing is to add your sugar to a pan over medium heat and let it melt. Be careful not to get your pan too hot or the sugar will burn and you'll be left with a big brown clump that will harden like a rock and become impossible to clean! not speaking from personal experience or anything...After the sugar is melted, stir in your fresh lime juice followed by your butter and maple syrup. It should be smelling fantastic right about now. Allow the mixture to thicken a bit and then add your coconut. If it still seems a bit watery you can throw more coconut in. Remove the pan from the heat and let it cool for a bit.

Now the challenging part, you need to cut each apple into 4 pieces using horizontal cuts. You should be able to stack the slices back on top of each other when you're done. If you're struggling to cut four pieces, three will work fine, more layers just look more impressive. After you have your apples cut, you need to take out the core from the middle layers. Ultimately, you should have an apple bottom, two apple rings, and an apple top.

Once your apples are all cut it's time to add your coconut mixture and get stacking. Set your apple bottom on a piece of aluminum foil (big enough to wrap the whole apple in when you're done) and spoon some of the coconut mixture on. Place your first coconut ring on top and repeat the process again. It should look something like this.

Keep alternating coconut and apple, ending with your apple top.

Afterwards, just wrap them up good and tight with aluminum foil and they're ready for the oven! It might  not be a bad idea to wrap them in two sheets of foil, just to make sure none of those juices leak out all over your oven. You can either place your wrapped up apples on a pan or right on the oven rack.

If your oven is preheated and ready, just pop them in and let them cook at 400 degrees F for about 25 minutes. If you don't think they're soft enough after the 25 min feel free to leave them in a bit longer, it definitely won't hurt them!
After you take them out of the oven, be sure to be careful unwrapping them from the foil. The bottoms will be filled with juices and it could easily turn into a huge mess!

If you're going for the gold star in culinary presentation, you can try transferring your apples to plates while still stacked, but I promise it will still taste good if it falls over. You can also take some of the extra juices from the bottom of the foil and drizzle them over the top. These are super sweet, but so delicious!