Apples seem to be everywhere this month. Little rosy crab apples are urging me to make chilli jelly, we have bowls of nutty russets from my mother-in-law and cooking apples are being made into apple sauce, partly for my home-made granola.
I have to admit that our own apple harvest will be exactly one large cooker. A generous sized cooker, one that Ruby has ambitious plans for;we read James and the Giant Peach recently and she’s christened it the Giant Apple. But still, just one apple.
Although our own apple trees were only planted last winter, we live in an area where there’s no shortage of apples. The village that Ruby goes to school in has orchards right in the middle of the village and everyone’s garden seems to have a plentiful supply. I drive past the village church every morning and see apples falling on to the pavement. Sometimes I treat myself to a walk up the hill after school drop-off and apples litter the foot-path.
In recent years many of the apples in the villages around us seemed to go to waste. Lovely then that our nearest pub, The Ebrington Arms organised a family apple pressing day recently in their garden. It was one of those wonderfully bright, golden Autumn days (before the grey fog and drizzle!) and lots of people turned up with bags, baskets or wheelbarrows of apples to be juiced. Children held cups under the fruit press to have the first taste of the juice from their own apples.
We came away after a lovely afternoon with bottles of apple juice (from Granny’s apples) and two demi-johns of toffee coloured juice which will hopefully be cider. It seems to be bubbling away nicely under the stairs at the moment.
My thoughts also turn to apple cake though at this time of year. Particularly when I walk across the fields to visit our Icelandic friends and glimpse the orchard next to their home.
A couple of years ago we borrowed an apple press from friends and had our own juicing session in our garden. We were joined by our Icelandic friends and their Rome-dwelling, contemporary opera-singing visitor Gulla who turned out to be super-human when it came to operating the apple press. She squeezed more juice out than we thought possible and, having previously joined in wine-making festivities in Italy, became just as enthusiastic about anything to do with apples. In fact every time I visited our friends that Autumn, Gulla seemed to be either picking apples in the orchard, juicing them, fervently peeling them or baking apple cake.
Her apple cakes were delicious, always different variations on a theme, sometimes with added almonds, maybe with vanilla adding to the flavour. I couldn’t pin her dowh to a recipe of course; Gulla seemed to be the sort of instinctive cook I envy who didn’t stick to any precise recipe, just adding what she felt like each time.
So the recipe for this apple cake is one I’ve baked in Autumn for years, is handwritten scruffily and I originally copied it from my Mum. Inspired by Gulla I do vary it according to mood, sometimes using wholemeal self-raising flour, sometimes substituting some of the flour for ground almonds if I have them to hand. A few drops of vanilla essence don’t go amiss either and sometimes it’s nice to add raisins or other dried fruit. Either way, it’s a very easy, bung it all in sort of recipe. The apple keeps it nicely moist and it stores well in a tin. A great one to bake with kids and, although it takes quite a while to bake (filling the kitchen with a lovely, comforting cinnamony aroma) it occupies very little time for the actual making.
This time though, I made it without Ruby. Remembering the recipe came from my Mum, I also have memories of her baking cakes for us to come home from school to. Reminded of this, I thought I’d treat Ruby to cake still warm from the oven after school. Normally I feel she’s too young to be able to scoff cake and still eat a healthy dinner. But she needed extra energy for dancing, it’s been cold, foggy and drizzly for days and I thought we all needed a treat.
Apple and Cinnamon Cake
300g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
250g soft brown sugar
125g unsalted butter, melted
2 large eggs, beaten
175 ml milk
250g apples, peeled, cored and chopped. This time I used 1 large Bramley & a couple of russets but I vary cookers & eaters, depending what’s to hand.
Sift flour, cinnamon and salt, stir in sugar. Mix in melted butter, eggs, milk and apples, beat until smooth. Turn into a lined and greased tin (a 20cm square tin or equivalent) and bake 180C 1-1 1/4 hours until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
And actually, who am I kidding that it’s all about after school treats. This cake is of course lovely with a coffee too. Or warm with ice-cream or greek yoghurt as a pudding.
Love cakes with a sprinkling of memories. Looks delicious.
Me too, thanks Evie!
That cake looks wicked, we make a Dorset Apple Cake and it will be nice to have a change but still have an apple cake!
Many thanks, Lynn
Dorset Apple Cake sounds wonderful too, definitely apple cake time at the moment isn’t it.
I’ve got some sloe gin cider which I hope will taste good in a week or so…
I read somewhere recently, that people have started to use juicers in home cider production with good results. It would be interesting to compare the results of both.
Your apple cake looks delicious
Sloe gin cider sounds intriguing – would love to hear how you make it? And definitely need to experiment with different ways of making cider. We have added wine yeast to one demi-john and leaving the wild yeasts in the other to work their magic, will be interesting to see how they turn out.
What a perfect cake for this time of year. I love how simple the recipe is and how you can adapt it depending on what you have to hand. Delicious!
Thanks Laura and I do think apple cake is perfect for this time of year. A bit too perfect though, the cake tin in the corner of the kitchen keeps beckoning every time I make a coffee or tea!
Ruby is a very lucky young lady to come home from school to such a delicious cake – hope she was suitably impressed! I love the idea of serving the cake warm as a pudding too.
Thanks Sarah. She did say it was delicious(which was welcome, she doesn’t always says this to my cooking!) and her friend was keen too – so much so that I have a package of cake for her on the side of the kitchen by my keys, so that I remember to take it to her as promised tomorrow!
G’day! Love the stories behind cooking and baking, true!
Your Apple and Cinnamon Cake looks very moist and made with lots of love too!
Cheers! Joanne
Thanks Joanne. It is a very moist cake, thanks to the amount of apple, maybe this is what helps it keep for a while too.
Your cider looks far more lively than ours, which seemed to start off OK and then stalled. It’ll be interesting how your two different ones turn out. Your apple cake sounds delicious; this year I’ve been making apple crumble cake but will have to try your recipe as we need something different.
Apple crumble cake sounds lovely. Just had another apple delivery from my mother-in-law last night and need to be creative on the apple from too. I made rhubarb crumble muffins earlier in the year and you’ve put the idea of apple crumble muffins into my head….
Thank you Andrea, I’m desperate for apple ideas. I’m knee deep in them this year, even the pigs can’t keep up with them!
I bet your pigs are happy! Your apple juice is lovely though, a brilliant thing to do with them. I also use apples lots in those oatie slices, the greengage ones that you made with damsons, another easy one. Look forward to hearing what you do with yours.
Apple cake reminds me of my aunt who collected every windfall and removed the bruises, worms etc before baking. She never wasted a single thing. How tragic to hear that English apples are abundant when I have the choice of horrid ones all the way from the US, green tasteless from France or a tiny bag of 6 Waitrose apples for an extortionate amount of money!
Your aunt sounds a lot like me mother in law, who also hates waste and turns up with lots of windfalls, leaving the precious perfect ones still on the tree for best. Very grateful though! So good too that lots of people around here are using the apples again from the old trees they’re lucky enough to have – it used to frustrate me seeing them all going to waste and knowing so many people were buying those tiny plastic wrapped packets from the supermarket instead.
Lovely idea for a cake. I’m jealous of your crab apples!
They’re from our friend’s garden and I’ve now made crab apple and chilli jelly for us and our friends – it sets so easily, the crab apples are so full of pectin.