Panna Cotta with Sweet and Sour Caramel Apple / Panna cotta met zoet-zure karamelappel

Aieeyaaa! This could have been such a nice dessert, but unfortunately, it wasn't.

The sauce was the major issue. If you fry the apples in butter on high heat, as you're supposed to do, the butter will burn while the apples will come out largely uncooked (though you might like that). If you then add 3 tablespoons sugar and deglaze with only 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, you definitely won't get a syrup but caramel, one that is so hard and sticky that you shouldn't serve it to any guests unless you don't have anything to say to them anymore. We used half of the sauce/caramel tonight; to the other half, I added another tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and 2 of water and then reduced it to a still quite liquid sauce/syrup - which is more like what it was supposed to be.

Minor things: You're supposed to line the panna cotta cups with gladwrap. In principle, the idea is very good, it has never been so easy to remove them from the cups - but only if you don't mind if it ends up with wrinkels and dents instead of a perferctly shaped panna cotta, in which case you won't need the gladwrap anyway.

Another pet peeve of mine: Don't lie on photos. Of course it may have been due to something I did wrong, but on the photo, the dish is depicted with the apple slice decoratively placed on top of the panna cotta. In real life, it didn't work (or only for something like 5 seconds max).

The panna cotta itself was very nice, perfect texture. I don't like the flavour of star anise so I used 4 semi-crushed cardamom pods instead. I was afraid that might have been too much, but actually it worked out quite well.