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French Apple Cake

A few extra simple steps create a delightful fruit-filled cake you'll be happy to share—or keep for yourself.
Course Dessert
Cuisine French
Servings 10 to 12

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.

Kitchen Notes

Pick your apples. We used Cosmic Crisp apples, which maintained their shape well and tasted lovely. These are currently available at Costco. Alternatives could be Granny Smiths, McIntosh, Fuji, Honeycrisp, Golden Delicious, or Empire. Heritage varieties like Russets and Ida Reds would be great, too, but can be harder to find. Don't use Red Delicious or Gala.
Choose your booze. Calvados, which is an apple brandy, is tops in this, but other options work wonderfully too. We used Korbel brandy, the cheap stuff, which is terrible for drinking but, with its extra sweetness, is totally great for cooking. Rum, pretty much any dark rum, would work well too. If you prefer not to cook with alcohol, then you may omit it entirely.