Transcript of Recipe: Chef Kevin Belton's Homemade Fig Newtons

hi guys chef kevin belton here hope you're having a fantastic day now tomorrow is national fig newton day i don't know if as a kid you were like me but i tell you what that was one of the most interesting cookies that i ate as a child was a fig newton i loved figs grandma made homemade figs preserved which was fantastic so to celebrate tomorrow i'm going to show you how to make a homemade fig newton all right you can do it yourself now what i've gotten together in the bowl so far i have light brown sugar and butter okay half a cup of butter three quarter cups of light brown sugar and it was packed and i just creamed it out to that i'm going to put in an egg and i put in my vanilla with the egg now we just want to blend this together just for a minute now this is nice and smooth to this for our dough i'm using all purpose flour this is whole wheat flour so i have three quarter cups of all-purpose flour half a cup of whole wheat flour a teaspoon of baking powder and a half teaspoon of salt now this is going to be for our crust so let's just go ahead and get these mixed together right quick and now i'm going to just add this together and we only want to mix this just enough for this to come together and you see it's fairly crumble it's not a very dry dry type dough so i'm going to save out i want to save out about three quarter cups of our dough look at this texture see that texture see that's what we're looking for that's what we want so i'm going to save out about three quarter cups of it and if you've noticed in my pan here i've taken a pan this is an eight by eight pan and i've lined it with parchment paper going both ways and you see i've sprayed it really good now what i want to do is get this in and i'm just going to press this down make sure it's flat into the corners and i have the oven preheating at 350 degrees okay so we're going to bake this in the oven for 20 minutes once i get it smoothed out and while this is baking i'm going to take the remainder of this dough put it between parchment paper and make it into an eight inch square for our top layer so let me go ahead and get this smoothed out and we'll get this in the oven and baked our crust is baked and as you can see it's got nice and golden just needs about 20 minutes now what i've done with our figs okay i had taken dried figs and basically cubed them up um with the figs you want to make sure you cut off any stems on the figs now this is what i use i started with just dried figs and i made sure the little stems were cut off because they could be a little hard okay i cooked them in a in two cups of apple juice okay i had about a cup of the figs i quartered them two cups of apple juice let them simmer for about 30 minutes got them real soft then i poured that in a food processor with the juice of a lemon okay and that's how it's pureed to this point so now we want to take this our figs and just spread this out spread this over the top you know this brought back so many memories of grandmother when she made that homemade fake preserve all right just kind of spread it out and you know this is a very forgiving recipe now remember i told you i was going to take the top and try to make it into an eight by eight square well what i did i put it in the freezer and here is our top i did it between the parchment paper it's nice and cold but this is also very very forgiving because if it does crack a little bit that's okay as it bakes that seam is gonna close so let me get this up all right almost there oh of course it was gonna do that but you know what that's okay let's put a corner down because like i said it's really forgiving let me get that other little piece right up and get that in now if you're wondering why i'm not worried because it's cracking okay because remember once this bakes we're going to cut these and once they're cut nobody's going to ever recognize that that happened so i just want to press it lightly okay for to adhere to it and look see the little extra here i can take this little extra and just patch but let's go ahead and finish baking this off tell you what the smell is so good but look at this now now that it's baked look how that top worked out that top worked out so great not only thing left is to let it cool i'm gonna let it rest for a couple of hours before i even try to cut this but i tell you what what a great way to celebrate thick noon day by making homemade fig newtons thank you so much for cooking with me today keep washing those hands stay safe for wwl tv i'm chef kevin belton and we'll see you soon