An early Christmas present.

Thanks to all of you, we here at Poor Richard’s Almanac—our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, and Richard Saunders—got an early Christmas present this year: We just passed the 50,000 visitor mark on our blog!!!

Alert readers will note that our Sitemeter shows 40,075 visits, and may think we need glasses like our blog mentor and hero, Ben Franklin. But we haven’t lost our minds or our eyesight—being Luddites, it just took us a very long time to think of adding Sitemeter to our site, and then we had to persuade a tech-savvy friend to set it up for us. Fortunately, WordPress also tracks visits to the site, and it’s through them that we know that Poor Richard’s has racked up 50,136 visits since we started our blog back in February. We can’t think of a better Christmas present! Thank you all for coming to see us, coming back, and commenting. We love you!!!

We remember promising when we reached 35,000 visits that we’d do something special to mark 50,000. So Silence is going to give you a sinfully rich-tasting yet surprisingly simple recipe that you’ll have no trouble finding time to make even during the hectic holiday season. Richard promises to provide a little-known fact about the Founding Father of your choice. (Let him know via the comments section who you’d like to know more about. He swears that even if 38 of you ask for obscure facts about, say, George Washington, he’ll dig up 38 different things. So don’t be shy! Who knows what we’ll all learn!) And our friend Ben will reveal little-known facts about Silence—just kidding, Silence! ow!!!—I mean, our friend Ben will, uh, er, um…

[Silence, breaking in] Our friend Ben will finally shut up?

[OFB] Grrrr! How about this: Our friend Ben will provide interesting facts about any creature, from your favorite dinosaur or trilobite to jellyfish and woodpeckers. You have only to ask, and I will answer! So okay, Richard and I are standing by, waiting for your calls, uh, comments. Meanwhile, let’s turn the post over to Silence so she can give you that recipe (and trust me, it’s a winner!):

Silence Dogood here. Cold weather calls for hot comfort foods, right? And what could be more comforting than a baked apple? But baked apples can get a little, well, boring. As a child, I loved caramel apples, and I still think of them fondly. But I don’t make them—too much melted-caramel mess, too much trauma to the teeth—and I don’t want a cold dessert when it’s cold outside, anyway. So I decided to go for the best of both worlds, a sinfully decadent caramelized baked apple. These luscious apples take an hour to bake, but ten minutes to make, so you can pop them in the oven as you’re getting supper ready and enjoy the tantalizing aroma throughout the meal, then serve them up for dessert. Ice cream lovers can top them with vanilla or caramel swirl ice cream, but we purists love them as is. Try them and see what you think!

          Silence’s Baked Caramel Apples

Buy one large, tart baking apple, such as a ‘Granny Smith’,  for each person. (Don’t use ‘Delicious’ apples, please—they’re only good fresh.)  Wash and core the apples, making an ample space in the middle of each, and compost the cores. (We always save one for our golden retriever, Molly, who relishes them.) Pour apple cider in the bottom of an oven-proof baking dish so it’s about 1/2 inch deep. Arrange the apples in the dish. Add a pat of butter and a teaspoon of brown sugar to the cider for every apple. In the hollow center of each apple, add another pat of butter, another heaping teaspoon of brown sugar, and raisins to fill. (We like a mix of raisins, but if you only add one kind, use golden raisins.) If you’re a nut person, mix broken pecan pieces with the raisins before stuffing the apples. And yes, you can add a pinch of ground cinnamon and/or cloves if you want; but much as I love both cinnamon and cloves, I think they complicate the caramel flavor unnecessarily in this case. Bake for an hour at 350 degrees F. and serve, pouring the thickened cider sauce over each apple. Yum!!!

By the way, you can use the leftover cider to make hot mulled cider by adding Gosling’s Black Label Rum (our favorite) to taste and a stick or two of cinnamon plus four whole cloves to a quart of cider (minus the amount used for the apples) in a pan. (Heat the cider with the spices, then add the rum once it’s hot and serve.) But don’t make this luscious drink the same night you make the caramel apples—that’s too much apple for anybody!

Enjoy these yummy apples, and again, thank you so much for bringing Poor Richard’s Almanac to this milestone. Y’all come back now, hear?!!

            —our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, and Richard Saunders