Comfort Food Rediscovered: Apple Cake
Recently, we had the pleasure of rediscovering a cake that we used to make in college, long before our career as a pastry chef had begun. It’s a simple cake with sautéed apples, a healthy amount of butter and just enough lemon zest to make things interesting. It’s great for dessert, tea and--if you must--studying.
Following this recipe again for the first time in years, we saw how natural it was that this cake would have been one of our favorites at a time when cooking tools were scarce and time even more so. It required no creaming of butter and sugar, no fancy pans--really no special talent or equipment at all. Just sauté apples, mix everything together and flop it into a pyrex pan. It was a collegiate baker’s dream.
To our joy and surprise, cooking is now something we do every day for a living. We make chocolates and wedding cakes, brioches and éclairs, but sadly the apple cake has been forgotten until now. True, it’s not fancy or showy and we might not put it on a dessert menu; but it’s an honest sort of recipe, one in which the end result tastes of its origins--only amplified.
Sometimes we miss the days when cooking meant sneaking off and ignoring our responsibilities; when the only person we were aiming to please was ourselves. This cake was enough to please us then. Now, eating it again, we see that it still is.
The recipe is after the break.
Photo by Rachael Coyle
Apple Cake
makes one 8-9" cake, 6-8 servings
9 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 apples, peeled, halved, cored and cut into 1/4” slices (we like braeburn for this, but any will do)
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
zest of 1/2 a lemon
powdered sugar
Butter an 8-9” pan (we use a deep-dish pyrex pie plate) and dust with sugar, tap out the excess sugar and set aside. Preheat oven to 350 F. In a large sauté pan, melt the butter and pour out about 2/3 to be used in the cake batter. Sauté the apples in the remaining butter over medium heat until soft but not mushy. In a large bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. In another bowl, whisk together wet ingredients, including lemon zest and melted butter. Fold the wet and dry ingredients together until just incorporated. Mix in apples. Pour into prepared pan and bake for about 45 minutes, or until golden brown and baked through (this will take a while, as the apples are quite damn--but if you use a clear pie plate, you can just look at the underside of the cake to see.) Let cool, cut in wedges and dust with confectioner’s sugar. Enjoy.
