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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Bite of the Week - Homemade Apple Cake

Ellen's Apple Cake

"Who the heck is Ellen?"

That was the million dollar question as Mom rifled through a stack of old recipes, pulling out a raggedy-looking index card with some handwriting on it.  Apparently, Ellen was a friend of my mother's who had an awesome recipe for apple cake and kindly passed it down to Mom.  Since we had already picked out several delicious apples at Barden's Family Orchard, we decided that now was the time to put them to good use and make the cake.

You will need:
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups of sugar
  • 3/4 cup of vegetable oil
  • 3 cups of chopped apples
  • 2 cups of flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
  • 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon of salt
  • 1 teaspoon of baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon of vanilla

Please note that if you're missing a little sugar (say about two tablespoons), you can always swipe some packets from your local Dunkin Donuts (not that we would know anything about that).


Honeycrisp apples

STEP ONE: Peel, core, and cut up the apples into chunks. Now, Mom is super skilled at this and I'm ... well ... not. She could almost get the entire peel off in one shot (my Memere could do it), while I chose to scrape mine to death. I almost killed myself trying to get the core out, but after we were done, we realized that we only needed about one and a half of the two giant apples we had prepared. 


STEP TWO:  Beat the eggs.  Simple enough.


STEP THREE:  Pour the oil, eggs, and sugar onto the apples and mix well until the entire thing feels like sludge.


Sludge-like mixture

STEP FOUR:  In a separate bowl, mix up the flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg.


STEP FIVE:  Add vanilla to the apples.


STEP SIX:  Mix in the dry ingredients until the batter has the consistency of wallpaper paste.  Mmm, mmm, good.


STEP SEVEN:  Pour the cake into a sprayed/buttered tube pan.  You can actually use any shape pan you want, you just have to adjust the cook time (we used a large loaf pan).


STEP EIGHT:  Bake at 350 degrees for an hour to an hour and 15 minutes.


Check out the finished product!  It was as tasty as it looks here.  The cake's edge had a slight crunch to it, the inside was moist and flavorful, and the Honeycrisp apples held true to their name and stayed crispy throughout.  That Ellen certainly knows her stuff, and so does Mom.


ENJOY!