A few extra simple steps create a delightful fruit-filled cake you’ll be happy to share—or keep for yourself. Recipe below.
WE’VE BEEN IN THE MOOD TO BAKE LATELY. So when a wintry cold snap aligned with a new-to-us apple find, we were ready to warm up the kitchen and try a new-to-us apple cake recipe.
This apple cake, with a few variations by us, is based on one over at the marvelous blog Brown Eyed Baker. Michelle (the Brown Eyed baker) calls it French Apple Cake. It’s a bit fiddly. For instance, it has an extra step I’ve never encountered before, requiring you to create a separate top layer of batter, and to assemble it required FOUR bowls. So before jumping in, we looked at other French apple cake recipes. Others had their own fiddly aspects—sautéing the apples first, using multiple kinds of apples… All involved using some kind of alcohol, with dark rum being the favorite. But we kept returning to this recipe.
And once it came out of the oven, it was so pretty, and it smelled so good, and tasted so delicious, that it was completely worth the extra steps. And the sugar sprinkled on top before baking added a nice little bit of crunch.
We are in love with it. We originally intended to share wedges of the cake with our neighbors, but after tasting it, we, um, didn’t. It was so good that it triggered our “I’m tired and it’s cold and I’ve been working really hard” response. Make it. You’ll love it too.
French Apple Cake
Equipment
- 9-inch springform pan
Ingredients
- 1-1/2 pounds cooking apples, about 4 large apples (see Kitchen Notes)
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon brandy, Calvados or dark rum (see Kitchen Notes)
- 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose unbleached flour, divided
- 1 cup plus 2 tablespoon granulated sugar, divided
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 egg plus one egg yolk
- 1 cup vegetable oil, plus extra for the baking pan—we used grapeseed oil
- 1 cup whole milk or 3/4 cup lowfat milk and 1/4 cup half and half
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- powdered sugar, for dusting (optional)
Instructions
- First, prepare the apples. Peel and core them, then cut them into quarters. Slice the quarters lengthwise into thin wedges. One apple should yield 16 of these slices. Put them on a pie plate, cover them with a sheet of parchment paper or waxed paper, and microwave for about two and a half minutes, until they are just barely translucent. Put them in a medium bowl, add the lemon juice and Calvados, and toss everything together with your hands. Then set the bowl aside to let the apple slices cool.
- Prepare the springform pan with cooking oil. When I made this, I also encased the bottom of the pan with aluminum foil to stave off leaks. Set the pan on a baking sheet and preheat the oven to 325ºF.
- Next, put 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of sugar, the nutmeg, salt and baking powder into a medium bowl and gently stir together with a fork.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the whole egg, the milk, oil and vanilla. when everything is smooth, add in the dry ingredients and whisk again, just until everything is combined. Measure out 1 cup of this batter and put it in a small bowl. Set that aside for now.
- Add the one egg yolk to the large bowl and stir it in. Then fold in the apples—they should be mostly cooled when you do this. Scrape this batter into the springform pan and even out the top. You need the top to be uniformly smooth.
- Add the extra 2 tablespoons of flour to the small bowl and mix together until it is uniform. Then carefully spread this enhanced batter on top of the batter in the springform pan. Try to make it smooth and uniform in thickness.
- Finally, sprinkle the last 2 tablespoons of sugar all over everything. Put the cake on the middle rack in the oven.
- Bake until the center of the cake is set, the top is golden, and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. This will take about 70 minutes or so.
- Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 10 minutes. Then slip a thin knife around the sides of the pan, loosen and remove the ring, and let the cake cool completely. Serve this, if you like, with whipped cream or a little vanilla ice cream, or, as my mother used to say, just a hungry mouth.