Smitten Apple Cake

06Feb10

This cake is simply and utterly amazing. The moist, apple texture is divine and it’s perfect dusted with icing sugar and cut into slabs. The recipe came from Deb at Smitten Kitchen and was her mother’s Jewish apple cake recipe. My family has firmly adopted it as their own and it will be reguarly served up for birthdays, treats and days when no celebratory justification can be found except a love of apples.

Ingredients
6 apples (if they’re large, otherwise 7 or 8, be generous)
1 tbsp cinnamon
5 tbsp raw sugar
2 3/4 cups plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups sugar (I use 1 1/2 of caster sugar and 1/2 cup of raw)
1/4 cup orange juice
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
4 eggs
1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)

Method
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. 350 degrees. Grease a tube pan and line the bottom with paper if you are worried about sticking. Peel, core and chop apples into hearty chunks. Toss with the cinnamon and sugar, set aside.

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. In another bowl whisk the oil, orange juice, vanilla and sugar. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mix. Then add your eggs, one at a time (I tend to break them into a seperate bowl and whisk them individually first, but this is probably over-zealousness in action).

Pour half the batter into the greased tube pan. Place the apples on top, pouring all the cinnamony juices in as well. Then top the apple with the remaining batter. If you want keep back half the apple for sprinkling on top. Bake for 1 1/2 hours (mine took only an hour, so keep checking until the tester comes out clean). Sprinkle with icing sugar to serve.

Source: The wonderful and incomparable, Smitten Kitchen.

Best cooked to… The best and only band you could cook this to is The National. Being from Brooklyn they seem to naturally mesh with this recipe. My favourite songs are Slow Dance and Fake Empire.

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