Our Family's Traditional Apple Cake: A Fail-Proof Recipe

What can I say about this cake? It is about as close to perfection as a fall cake can come: grown-up enough to serve for brunch, or afternoon tea, or at the end of a sophisticated dinner, but sweet enough to feel like a good and proper dessert and sate your dessert craving. The only butter in the cake is what you spread around the cake pan, and yet the cake forms a sublime, slightly crunchy caramelized crust on the top and bottom. The apples sink and melt into the batter, keeping the cake moist without weighing it down.

Are you drooling yet?

This cake is also versatile. We kept the apples chunky but our aunt’s recipe advised us to slice them thin; we stirred them directly into the batter, where our aunt spread layers of batter, then apples, batter, then apples, then more batter in the cake pan; we made it a second time with 2 cups of firmly packed dark brown sugar instead of 2 cups of white sugar, and it was even deeper and richer than the first cake. You could change the cake entirely by adding ginger to the cinnamon, or perhaps a teaspoon of ground cardamom, or substitute a dash of rum or Calvados for half of the vanilla. You can toast slivered almonds and sprinkle them on top of the cake, or make a maple syrup glaze and pour that on top. Possibilities? Endless.

I suggest you stock up on apples and try as many variations as you can think of - and send us the recipes, photos, and videos when you do.

APPLE CAKE

• 2-3 large, tart apples, cored and peeled
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons cinnamon

• 2 cups flour
• 2 cups white sugar or 2 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 2 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• Powdered sugar, for dusting; or toasted slivered almonds

Optional maple syrup glaze:

• maple syrup
• powedered sugar

Preheat your oven to 350ºF and lightly butter a cake or bundt pan.

Chop your apples into uniform chunks and toss, in a bowl, with the sugar and cinnamon. Set aside.

In a large bowl, combine your dry ingredients and stir. Stir in the eggs and the oil. Stir in the vanilla.

Either gently fold the apples into the batter and pour everything into the cake pan, or pour 1/3 of the batter into the prepared cake pan, then 1/2 the apples, 1/3 of the batter, the last 1/2 of the apples, and top with the remaining 1/3 of batter. There should be quite a bit of extra room at the top of the pan; trust me, you’ll need it.

Bake at 350ºF for 65 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool, in the pan, to room temp, then invert onto a plate and flip back over. Sprinkle generously with powdered sugar, toasted slivered almonds, or a maple syrup glaze.

To make a maple syrup glaze, simply whisk together maple syrup and powdered sugar - start with just a little and add more as necessary - until the glaze reaches your desired thickness.

Viewer Submissions!

So we’ve got some viewer submissions to share with you, and they’re all so different and fantastic. I hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

First up, Valérie in Montréal sent in her recipe for Fruit Ketchup:

Valérie writes:

• 36 red tomatoes
• 6 peaches
• 6 pears
• 6 apples
• 4 Spanish onions
  
• 1 whole celery stalk
• 2 green peppers
  
• 1 red pepper
• 4 cups of sugar
• 3 cups of white vinegar
• 45 ml of pickling spices
  

• cheesecloth
• approximately 12 jars of 500ml

First, you most peel the tomatoes. I use a sharp knife to cut a little cross on each tomato than I put them in boiling water. After 30 to 60 seconds, you take them out of the hot water and you put them in a bowl that you’ve already fill with cold water and some ice cubes to be sure that it pretty cold. That way it become a piece of cake to peel them beacause the skin roll up a bit.

Then, you dice (like half an inch big) :

• the tomatoes (and seeded them too!),
• and you peel all the fruits
• the celery, peppers and onions

Next, you pour all that in a big cauldron with the sugar and the withe vinegar. After that, you take some layers of cheesecloth and you put the pickling spices in it (wrap it with a thread to make  a little bundle) add it to the cauldron but don’t forget to take it out at the end of the cooking.

Cook for an hour (or more if you prefer a more soft texture) uncovered at med-low heat.

Finally, you put your new ketchup in jars and sterilize them. You can use the boiling water technique, but personally I usually put my jars in the oven at 200-250o Celsius for 15 minutes and boil my lids in water before filling them. It works well, just let you jars on the counter for at least an hour (put a clean dishtowel under them to minimize the temperature shock) and you will see them seal one at the time…

That’s it! It’s a bit long to do but it fun! And you have good ketchup for months (or form all you friends and family!). I like to eat it with pork chops, mashed potatoes and for chrismas with what we call a “tourtière” which is a traditional meat pie from Québec. Hope you enjoy!

Thanks for sharing that with us, Valérie! And to the rest of you out there - send in your recipes, photos, and videos to hungrynation.tv/submit, and make sure to select “Working Class Foodies” from the drop-down menu.

LIGHTING UP THE BLOGOSPHERE: BLURBS FROM THE BROOKLYN CHEESE EXPERIMENT

Please excuse and allow us a short moment of vanity as we share with you some of the press we got for our 3rd-place-audience-award-winning Homemade Ricotta Cheesecake with Homemade Sea Salt Dulce de Leche at the Brooklyn Cheese Experiment a few weeks back.

from Amateur Foodie Adventures:

The only non savory dish I found was the Ricotta Cheesecake made by the powerhouse sibling duo Working Class Foodies (otherwise known as Max and Rebecca Lando). The dish featured home made ricotta cheese, a shortbread crust, and home made sea salt dulce de leche. The samples were micro sized due to samples running low by the time I got to their table, but the taste was superb and not too sweet. Rebecca Lando had competed in the Brooklyn Beer Experiment…

from Experimental Culinary Pursuits:

Audience Picks:
1. Team Pirate’s Booty – Righteous Bun Cheesesteaks (Looks like my sous chef does have good taste)
2. Bonnie Suarez – Tomato Soup with Cheese Crackers
3. Rebecca Lando – Homemade Ricotta Cheesecake w/Sea Salt Dulce de Leche (Actually it was so good I took 2 extra bites of it. I’m glad it placed

From CHOW:

There were a few mac ’n’ cheese, lasagne, and enchilada entries, but the other standouts included food blogger Dave Klopfenstein’s delicious Morbier-stuffed slider with Gorgonzola mayo on a Camembert biscuit, and a dulce de leche cheesecake with homemade ricotta by Rebecca Lando.

Thanks again to everyone who came out to the event, and be sure to look for us at the LAMB TAKEDOWN this Sunday at the Highline Ballroom!

WCFOODIES WON 3rd PLACE AUDIENCE AWARD!

rebeccalando:

BIG thanks to everyone at the Brooklyn Cheese Cook-Off today, our ricotta cheesecake w/sea salt dulce de leche got 3rd place audience award!

First, we made a whole lot of dulce de leche.

Then we made our own ricotta.

Then, shortbread crusts.

Then: ricotta cheescakes.

Poured the dulce on.

Sprinkled with Murray River pink sea salt.

Then topped with raspberries.

We didn’t actually get to try any, and we ran out about 3/4 into the competition, which definitely cost us a few votes (definitely, we hope).

The cookoff was a blast and our fellow competitors were super friendly and talented. Thanks, everyone!

via rebeccalando

Seafood Cookoff: Bluefish vs. Mussels

MAX: BLUEFISH
When I was a kid, my grandpa would take me fishing almost every time I saw him. We were usually pretty successful, too. I always begged him to let me take our bounty home so my mom could cook it for dinner. He smiled and silently released each fish back into the water. I haven’t been fishing in a long time (too long) but I have eaten a lot of fish in my life. There have been the Florida standards of grouper sandwiches and grilled red snapper, bluefin tuna (hey, I was young and reckless) sashimi and salmon maki rolls. And – this one hurts to admit – the favored childhood combo of canned tuna and mac’n’cheese (I have since sworn off all canned tuna).

So when I saw Bluefish – a fish I had never cooked, ordered, or even encountered – at the Union Square Greenmarket, I had to try it. The only thing I knew about bluefish was that it had a bad rap for being too fishy and oily to enjoy. Wade promised me, however, that this large, violent fish was a fisherman’s favorite: as good to eat as it was fun to catch. I was sold.

I got my fillets home and quickly realized I had no idea how to cook a bluefish: would the dark flesh turn out flaky and dry, or would it stay meaty? What flavors are complementary? Should it be poached or grilled? To answer these questions, I turned to Mark Bittman’s Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, which offered three or four different bluefish recipes. I was immediately drawn to a grilled preparation that called for a marinade of garlic, lemon, and rosemary. The familiarity of those flavors spoke to me, especially against the backdrop of an unknown fish. In Florida, my parents and I made dinner on the grill almost every night, and so grilling the fish really spoke to the Floridian in me. But in New York, I don’t have a grill, so I broiled it instead, a similar method because the fish would be close to the flames, like on a grill.

The end result totally surpassed my expectations. The bluefish was tender and succulent, with just the right amount of bright, herby flavor. It wasn’t fishy or oily at all, and the meat, so dark when it was raw, had turned a much more palatable white color when it was cooked. The skin (my favorite part of a fish fillet) had loads of potential; next time I’ll expose the skin-side to the heat for a little longer to get that nice crispness I love.

REBECCA: MUSSELS
Before we lived in Florida, we’d go down every year to visit my grandparents. One night, when I was about 4 or 5, we went to a fish shack for dinner. At the time, I think I was subsisting on a steady diet of chicken fingers and French fries; outside of that first bite of solid food a couple of years before, I hadn’t exactly had a memorable, life-changing meal yet. Until I tried one of my mom’s mussels.

I don’t know how she convinced me to eat one; maybe it was the luster of the shells or the excitingly different orange flesh of the mussels themselves. Maybe it was the way she was scooping up the broth with an empty shell, the joyous slurping that looked like such fun. More likely, it was the enticing, inviting, intoxicating scent of the broth itself: rich with garlic, wine, butter, and tomatoes, a slight brininess from the shellfish.  Whatever it was the drew me in, overpowered me: I climbed onto my mom’s lap and devoured her entire dinner, all thoughts of chicken fingers abandoned, pretty much permanently.

Since then, I’ve never missed a chance to eat mussels. In a lot of ways, they’re a ‘wonder food’: high in protein, low in fat, and easy to raise - they grow naturally in salt and fresh water – and are affordable and versatile. Mussels can be steamed, boiled, smoked, grilled, or battered and fried. But my favorite way to eat mussels is steamed in broth. I’ve had mussels in coconut broth with lemongrass and chiles; with curry, mango, and anise; even with sake, ginger, and scallions. But my absolute favorite way of eating mussels is Belgian-style: a broth of butter, beer, and garlic. When I make this in Florida, for my parents, I add a little orange zest for some local flavor; but really, all that matters is that you use a beer you love and don’t skimp on the butter. We chose a Belgian-style beer brewed in upstate New York to keep things local, but frankly, you could use Guinness or Sam Adams or even Pabst. I just wouldn’t recommend using a pilsner.

Mussels are fantastically unfussy, too. Keep them in your fridge under a damp cloth for up to 2 days before cooking them; then just sweat your garlic in butter, toss in the mussels, and add a beer. Cover them and steam them for 10 minutes and serve them with a good, crusty bread (or, better yet, French fries) and you can eat them right out of the pot. Then immediately start thinking of what kind of broth you’ll steam your mussels in next time.



BLUEFISH
The recipe for Mark Bittman’s grilled bluefish fillets can be found in his book, Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, which is one of the most useful cookbooks we own. But basically, here’s all you need to do:

1 lemon
2 whole scallions, including green ends (optional)
2 cloves of garlic
½ cup olive oil
2 sprigs fresh rosemary, minced, plus 4 whole sprigs for the grill/broiler
2 bluefish fillets, about 2 lbs total

Mix together everything but the bluefish, then toss the fillets in the marinade and marinate at least 30 minutes, turning occasionally.

Heat a grill or broiler and line with the sprigs of rosemary. Lay the bluefish down with the skin away from the heat and cook 4-5 minutes, running a spatula under the fish every now and then to keep it from sticking. Baste with some of the marinade and flip over so the skin side is facing the heat and broil or grill another 4-5 minutes or until the skin is brown and crispy. Remove from the heat and drizzle with olive oil, a little lemon zest, and some fresh rosemary.

Fresh thyme is also a delicious addition to this recipe.

MUSSELS
6 cloves of garlic, minced
4 Tablespoons of butter
16 oz beer
1 ½ - 2 lbs of mussels, cleaned and debearded (just scrub under cold water and pull off the beards)
salt and pepper

A good crusty bread (toasting and rubbing with ½ a clove of garlic is optional, but quite delicious)

Melt the butter over medium-low heat in a large, heavy saucepan. Add in the garlic and cook just past translucent, about 3 minutes. Add in the mussels and the salt and pepper; immediately pour the beer over the mussels, and cover with a lid. Leave covered and cook for about 10 minutes, shaking once halfway through. Remove the cover; the mussels should have opened.

Serve with big hunks of bread or garlic-rubbed toast.

Market Salad

As a kid, it wasn’t uncommon to see a simple green salad on the table as an accompaniment to the steak, or roast chicken, or whatever was for dinner. These salads were usually of the last minute, kitchen sink variety: some bag of pre-rinsed lettuce, bits of spare veggies, perhaps a can of hearts of palm. Oh, and of course, doused in one of those packaged, sodium- and hidden-fat laden dressings. I thought of these salads as an unfortunate prerequisite for dessert (of course with those dressings, the salad was just as unhealthful as dessert).

This scene probably isn’t all that different from other American households. Salad is often seen as the unwanted stepchild of the dinner table. I know I saw it that way. But it can be so much more. And it’s so damn easy, what with the prevalence of farmer’s markets nowadays. . For our salad, we picked an interesting lettuce in rocket. Grabbed some veggies at their seasonal peak (beans and the smallest of potatoes). Made a drop-dead-easy vinaigrette (one easy formula to remember is 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar). There’s a reason they call it a simple salad, right?

All of these ingredients alone would have made a beautiful salad to me, but what really threw it over the top were the queso blanc and the duck fat bread we turned into croutons. They added a richness that really set the whole thing off. 

My memories of childhood salads aren’t quite the same as my brother’s. I’ve always loved salad, but I’ve also always had strict salad rules: the lettuce must be fresh, crispy, and vivid; the dressing must be homemade and applied with a light touch; and the accoutrements must extend beyond raw carrots and celery (frankly, I prefer if you leave those two out altogether). As a broke sometimes-vegetarian in college, I found inventive ways to eat salads on the cheap. A favorite was a variation on the standard Israeli salad: I’d toss together chickpeas, grape tomatoes, lemon juice, olive oil and salt and pepper, and eat that with toasted pita bread every day for dinner. Sometimes, I’d splurge and treat myself to a few crumbs of fresh Feta.

And then, I discovered the Union Square Greenmarket, literally steps beyond the entrance to my dorm. For as little as $6, I could pick up an overwhelming variety of vegetables and fruits that would turn, almost on their own, into a week’s worth of salads. I grated raw, finger-long summer squash over baby field greens; paired slivered fennel bulbs with lemon and parmesan; and discovered my most favorite salad of all, and the simplest: chopped heirloom tomatoes; shredded basil; fresh mozzarella; cubes of day-old baguette; and plenty of salt. That’s a salad that I still eat almost daily in the summertime, even though, in college, it was an extravagance because the mozzarella doubled my usual spending limit to $12.

But even that salad wasn’t my most significant Greenmarket discovery. That honor falls fully on arugula. I’d had arugula plenty of times before, always in restaurants, and always left with the disappointment of, “so what?” I liked it better than iceberg, and it far outdid lank romaine, but it wasn’t until a farmer at a Greenmarket stand forced a leaf of tender, grass-green arugula into my hand that I really got it. Spicy, crisp, and packed with the grassy flavors of a fantastic olive oil. Arugula was a breakthrough. It was salad enlightenment. And it quickly became the base for all of my green salads.

The salad we’ve made today is the direct product of my salad days (to coin a phrase). It’s filling enough to make your whole meal, and is a great summer-to-fall transitional salad, perfect for those days when you’re too hot to spend much time in front of the stove but are ready to move on from summer’s peak produce. If you wanted a comparison, it’s most like a salad Niçoise, except we’ve left out expensive and unsustainable tuna and foregone the traditional hard-boiled egg. What we took from the Niçoise were blanched beans and boiled potatoes, and we capitalized on the rainbow beans from YuNo Farms and the itty-bitty, baby new potatoes from Paffenroth Gardens. The squash blossoms came from Conuco Farms and added a pop of color and sweetness to the salad. We chose the subtle, slightly chewy queso blanc from Patches of Star Dairy farm as a no-cooking-needed replacement for the texture and fat of the Niçoise’s standard hard-boiled eggs. Because the queso was made from goat’s milk, it was lighter than a cow’s milk cheese, and it’s farmer’s cheese-like consistently meant it stood up to the acids in our Dijon vinaigrette where many cheeses would break down and turn to mush. The roasted garlic duck fat bread from Bobolink Dairy – their general trade is in rich, pungent cheeses, and they got the duckfat for the bread from a duck farm in Sullivan County, NY – as a bold and deliciously indulgent salad pièce de résistance. With croutons made from something as wonderful and flavorful as that, who needs tuna?

RECIPE
¼ lb green beans
½ lb fingerling potatoes, uniform size
¼ lb (or two loose, heaping handfuls) arugula/rocket or other favorite green
4 oz. queso blanc or other mild cheese
4 squash blossoms
kosher and/or sea salt
pepper

1 cup roasted garlic duckfat bread*, cubed
1 clove of garlic, minced
¼ cup olive oil
*This is easy to make yourself. Just cube up any good, crusty baguette-type bread, preferably a day old, and toss in a pan with lots of crushed garlic, salt, and either a good deal of duckfat or olive oil.

DRESSING:
2T Dijon or whole-grain mustard
1T lemon juice or white wine vinegar
3T olive oil
1t chopped capers or cornichons, rinsed (optional)
1 clove minced garlic (optional)
1 T minced fresh herbs, such as thyme or tarragon (optional)
salt & pepper, to taste

For the dressing
First, make your dressing. If you’re doing the garlic, start with that in a small mixing bowl. Add in your mustard, then any herbs or capers or cornichons, then the oil, and then the vinegar or lemon juice, stirring vigorously all the while to blend it all together. Taste and adjust to your liking. When it’s right, cover it and stick it in the fridge while you do the rest.

For the beans & potatoes
Bring a pot of heavily salted water to a rolling boil. Drop in your beans and bring back to the boil; cook for 30-45 seconds, then remove beans quickly to a bowl of ice-cold water.

When the pot of water has cooled to just above room temperature, add the potatoes. Resalt, if necessary, and cover; bring to the boil. Depending on the size of your potatoes, boil 5-10 minutes; remove heat and let stand, covered, an additional 10 minutes, or until a fork slides easily into the center of each potato without causing the potato to totally fall apart. Toss the hot potatoes in ½ of the salad dressing and set aside.

For the croutons
In the meantime, mince up 1 clove of garlic and heat about ¼ cup of olive oil in a skillet. When the oil is hot, toss in the garlic and let cook about 1 minute, then add in your cubed bread. Toss it all together, and let it cook, tossing occasionally, until the croutons have soaked up the oil and are golden-brown.

For the arugula & squash blossoms
Wash your arugula. This might include as much as trimming off the root end and most of the stems. Rinse the arugula and spin it vigorously in your salad spinner; if your arugula is from the farmer’s market, you may have to do this 3 or 4 times before the water runs clear off the arugula. It’s worth it.

To wash the squash blossoms, first shake them around in cold water, then fill up the bulbs with water and dump them out. You might have to do this a few times, too.

Once the squash blossoms are clean, cut them in half and remove the pistles – and any ants that weren’t washed out. You can add them to the salad raw, or you can toss them with some olive oil and salt and roast them in a 350º oven for about 10 minutes, or just toss them in the pan you did the croutons in.

Serve the salad by either tossing everything – including the dressing and some crumbled up queso blanc – together in a shallow bowl, or by grouping the various toppings around a mound of arugula on individual plates and drizzling with the remaining dressing and crumbling the queso blanc on top.

LINKS:
Conuco Farms
The Greenmarkets of NYC
Bobolink Dairy