Apples are the one crop our orchard reliably produces, and apple cake is a delicious way to use a few up. This is a very simple, very basic apple cake, of the sort that French home bakers favour.
Ingredients
120 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
125 g flour
1/4 cup canola oil
3-4 apples
Method
- Heat the oven to 160C.
- Oil a 20 cm spring form tin and line the base with baking paper.
- Peel, core and dice apples.
- Mix together all the ingredients except the apple.
- Add the apples to the batter and stir to combine.
- Tip the batter into the cake tin and smooth it out a bit, making a shallow well in the centre (so you don't get a volcano like I did).
- Cook for 40 minutes.
- Cool on a rack in the tin for 10 minutes, then tip out to fully cool.
Homegrown Reine de Reinette and Red Delicious apples.
The eggs were supplied by a local dairy farmer who calls at the house twice a week. The flour came from Farine du Berry
and is available in the Intermarché supermarket in Yzeures sur Creuse. If you
don't grow your own apples I recommend the organic fruit from Fruits O Kalm,
the commercial orchard on the outskirts of Preuilly. They come to the
market in Preuilly on Saturdays and sell juice, apple sauce (bottles of
stewed puréed apple) and a range of apple varieties.
Organic cold pressed canola oil is available from a local producer who comes to some of the specialist gourmet markets in the area.
Other apple cake recipes on the blog:
Simple French Apple Upsidedown Cake
Gateau Titou aux pommes
An Update from the Kouign Amann Test Kitchen
Stone ground flour from the Berry.
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4 comments:
I'll bet that would be nice with a glass of Couteau de Layon... or Madeira....
Pommeau or sweet cider I reckon.
Pommeau... or "mostly apples" as I call it... I prefer it to calvados as it has more of the complexity of the tannins from the cider apples... so a much longer finish.
I prefer it to calvados too, but that's largely because I'm not a big fan of spirits in general. It's a shame pommeau is so hard to get outside of Normandy.
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