Not your gran’s apple cake

So, completely out of the blue, I ended up baking a new kind of apple pie today. It is a slight variation of a recipe that Clotilde has in her original Chocolate & Zucchini book. She calls it le gâteau de mamy, but I think it’s more apt to call it not your gran’s apple cake!

Really, I was meant to be practicing various savory cake recipes for our Russian bar night in a few weeks but it was getting late and all I really wanted after dinner was a piece of gooey, golden deliciousness. This turned out to be just that kind of cake, with the dough having almost a souffle-like texture with a bit of caramelized crunch.

This cake is now firmly on the list of my new favorite (but also easiest!) things to bake.

You’ll need the following ingredients:

• 125 g (1/2 stick) butter
• 70 g regular flour (approx 1/3 of cup)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• cinnamon and ginger ,to taste
• 2 medium-large apples, preferably Bramley
• 150 g sugar (2/3 cup)
• 30 g ground almonds, finely ground or processed are both fine (approx 1/8 cup)

(Since measuring conversions is sometimes confusing, this is a handy online measure conversion reference guide by ingredient.)

1. Preheat oven to 180 C (170 for fan ovens; about 350 F).

2. Melt the butter (easiest to do in a microwaveable bowl). Grease bottom of a round non-spring cake pan with some of the butter. Keep the rest for later on in the recipe.

3. In a small mixing bowl, combine flour, salt, baking powder.

4. Wash and core the apples.  I prefer not to peel them. They will cook really thoroughly so it won’t matter and I think the flavor and texture is better this way, but by all means peel the apples if you want. Cut the cored apples into half-inch (1.25 cm) slices and lay out along the bottom of the pan. Cover generously with cinnamon,  a bit of ginger, whatever else you like. The overall flavor of the cake is relatively delicate so I wouldn’t recommend any other spices that are too overwhelmingly strong.

5. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together eggs and sugar until fluffy and golden (this takes some forearm strength! I am still impressed with how Chef Christophe at the Cordon Bleu here in London whipped eggs into meringue in about a minute while chatting away to a group of prospective students, including Priya and I).

6. Add the dry ingredients (flour etc.) into the egg mixture and whisk until combined. Add the melted butter and whisk again to get everything blended together.

7. Pour batter evenly over the apples in the pan. Bake for about 40 minutes. The top of the cake will rise a little like a souffle (this may happen a bit unevenly i.e. the top of the cake will look ‘hilly’, that’s totally fine because you will actually be flipping it over!).

8. Let the pan cool slightly, for about 10 minutes. Run your knife along the edge of the pan, then cover the pan with a big plate/platter and flip the cake onto it, turning it upside down. It will be very delicate, as I said, so it will get squished easily so, be gentle!

9. Eat! My favorite part :).

Best eaten slightly warm still. This is so good I can’t even tell you. I would imagine it would be quite good with nice juicy pears as well. We’ll have to try it out sometime soon.

Enjoy!

– K