Baked apples stuffed with snausage

I conceived and made this dish a while ago, but never got around to posting.  It seems like a good Thanksgiving dish to me, so I'm putting it up now for the benefit of any last-minute types who are looking for a vegan protein to add to the plate.

I love baked apples and have always made them as a sweet dish.  My favorite way used to be to stuff them with chopped dried fruit and nuts.  This time around, it occurred to me that baked apples could be a savory dish.  I stumbled on a meatful recipe for baked apples stuffed with something disgusting like ground up pig muscle, and it occurred to me that I could stuff mine with vegan sausage.

The easy and peaceful way to do this would be to buy some vegan sausage, stuff it into the cavities left when you core the apples, and bake.  But I had to make my own sausage.  I looked at recipes calling for textured soy protein, tofu, tempeh (I don't actually like tempeh, but periodically think I should try to learn to like it), and seitan, and settled on one using frozen tofu.

I cored the apples, stuffed the cavities with snausage mixture, and baked as usual until the apples were done.  The snausage started to get brown too quickly, and so I covered the apples with foil for a while.  I would recommend starting out with them covered, and then uncover for the last 10-15 minutes of cooking.

They look cool when you slice them open:

Verdict:  this was fun, but I wouldn't make it the same way again.  I ended up with way too much snausage for the number of apples I had, and ended up nuking the rest and just eating it for breakfast one morning.  I also didn't think the snausage was tasty enough for the amount of trouble that went into making it.  The dried herbs didn't integrate with the frozen tofu very well; you could kind of distinguish them in your mouth.  If I were going to do this again, it would be because I wanted snausage for some other purpose, or had some leftover snausage lying around.  Maybe when I finally attempt the bean and seitan sausage that has taken the internets by storm, I'll seek out a few baking apples and give it another try.  I wouldn't use Italian snausage, though -- I'd recommend something more like a breakfast snausage flavor.  If you want to try this with store-bought snausage, I would try either the Tofurky snausage links (because I like all the Tofurky snausage products I've tried), or splurge on Field Roast sage-and-apple snausages, which I've never tried but don't they sound good?