It’s been a long, strange season in my life since I last posted. Summer came and went. I kept on cooking and eating, and even put in a kitchen herb garden, but I didn’t have the lightness of heart to blog about any of it. Now Fall has arrived—always my favorite season. The weather is cooling, the leaves are turning and I am letting go my obsession with fresh corn, aromatic peaches, sweet tomatoes, and the disappointments of the Summer. Time to think about apples, heady spices, pumpkin, and meals that warm the body and feed the soul.
Apple season always conjures a memory of my mother and Omi (your grandmother and great-grandmother) in the kitchen of my parents’ Anne Arbor, Michigan apartment, shortly after they moved there from Tennessee with Craig and our childhood dog, Zeus. Mom and Omi were collaborating in, and engaged in a lively debate about, the proper construction of an apple cake—a traditional German Apfelkuchen. What they disagreed about, and who won the debate, I couldn’t say. However, I do remember how beautiful the finished product was, and how amazing it tasted.
I never asked your grandmother for the recipe for this lovely cake. I’m sure if I had, it would have involved a small mixing bowl filled two-thirds with flour, a few handfuls of sugar, and unspecified amounts of baking powder, vanilla and milk. That was the way she and Omi baked. But many years later, I received from your grandmother a box of random things she could no longer keep, but could not bear to sell or donate when she and your grandfather embarked on their dream of living full time on the road in a 32 foot Winnebago. The box contained a spaetzle machine (of course), a Hummel figurine she purchased for a dollar from a second hand store in Oak Ridge, and a handful of recipe books. Among the recipe books was a slim volume on German baking published in the 1950s by Oetker, a German company founded in the late 1800s by August Oetker, the inventor of baking powder. And in that little volume was a photograph of the apple cake your grandmother and great-grandmother together made. What a find!
The cake itself is a lightly sweetened sponge, crowned with generous pieces of beautifully scored apples. The Oetker recipe calls for lemon flavoring, though I can’t remember your grandmother ever using any flavoring in her baked goods other than vanilla or almond. After the cake bakes and cools (assuming you are able to resist digging in as soon as it comes out of the oven), it gets a liberal dusting of powdered sugar. The sponge pillows around the apples and browns as the cake bakes, but the apples take center stage in this easy Fall dessert.
For this desert, it’s important to start with the right apples. Use too firm an apple and the fruit will not soften enough during baking for pleasant eating. I also prefer a sweeter apple to one that is very tart, like a Granny Smith. Try a McIntosh, Cortland, Golden Delicious or Gala apple for this recipe.
Ingredients
1 stick (8 Tbsp) unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 tsp lemon, vanilla or almond flavoring
1/2 tsp salt
1 and 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup whole milk
3-4 apples
powdered sugar
Instructions
Heat oven to 365 degrees. Cream the butter and sugar with a hand mixer until light and fluffy (2-3 minutes). Add eggs one at a time, and the flavoring, incorporating well. Stir together flour, salt and baking powder. Alternate incorporating 1/3 flour and 1/3 milk to the wet ingredients. You should have a thick batter. Line the bottom of a springform cake pan with parchment paper and butter or spray the sides with cooking spray. Spoon the batter into the pan and push it to the sides of the pan, smoothing the top.
Peel and core the apples and cut them into quarters. Make deep and narrow slits in the apples with a paring knife, taking care not to cut through the base of the apple quarters. Arrange the apples on top of the cake mixture. Sprinkle the top with granulated sugar and bake until the cake batter is golden brown and a skewer pushed into the cake comes out clean (35-45 minutes). Remove the warm cake from the springform pan and let it cool on a rack. Once cooled, sprinkle with powdered sugar.
MaeNot Favorite Recipes 