Tag Archives: apple cake

Let me open with this: looks are not everything. This cake may look fine, but what you can’t see is that there are random crystalized chunks of sugar all over the top of this. A lovely molar threatening crunch that I did not find all that appealing. What happened you might ask? I was an idiot, and I thought that I could just watch the video. In the video, they show the sugar/water mixture magically turn a beautiful golden brown; in reality, not so much. I missed the “no stirring” part, and since my mixture was staring to get a little dark on the bottom, I stirred it. Then as I was pouring it out into the top of my pan, it started to turn into candy chunks. Fun part, I ran out of sugar making the cake batter (so I couldn’t remake it), so I just threw everything in the oven and hoped for the best.

The actual recipe:

Serves 6

Ingredients:
6 Tbsp (¾ stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature,
plus more for greasing
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and sliced into 12 pieces
2 tsp cinnamon
1 ¾ cups sugar
2 eggs
⅓ cup buttermilk
2 tsp vanilla
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
Confectioner’s sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350F.

Thoroughly butter a 9-inch cast-iron pan and arrange the apple slices in the bottom of the pan, cut-side down. Sprinkle evenly with cinnamon.

In a sauce pan, combine 1 cup sugar with ⅓ cup water and bring to a boil until it turns light brown, about 10 minutes. Swirl the pan but do not stir. Pour over the apples.

In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and the remaining sugar until light and fluffy. On low speed, beat in the eggs and whip until smooth. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Slowly add ⅓ of the flour mixture and alternate between the milk and flour until all of the flour has disappeared. Stir in vanilla and pour on top of the apples.

Bake until the top is golden brown and an inserted toothpick comes out clean, about 30 to 40 minutes. Cool for at least 15 minutes then flip onto an appropriate size plate and dust with confectioner’s sugar.

• All in all, I will probably give this another try. It was just a bad situation on a not great day, and issues aside, the taste was okay. Andy even gleefully claimed the cake as “his” when I told him I wanted to toss the rest of it. It’s been his dessert and breakfast for the past couple of days.