Skip to main content

Cake Hacking - Spiced apple buckle cake..


I seem to be running out of excuses about avoiding eggs. Yes, I have a teensy fear of  eggs. I enjoy them as much as anybody else, in custards, cakes, cookies & ice cream, but the mere mention of trying to buy a box, and my brain goes into an overdrive to come up with bizzarre excuses to get away from that part of the grocery store. I've analyzed & hyper analyzed it & am perfectly aware that I sound like one of those afflicted  patients described in V.S Ramachandran's book 'Phantoms in the brain', perfectly capable of acknowledging that my quirk is 'eggcentric' to say the least, but balk at the thought of doing something to overcome it.


Eggs or no eggs, I still love cake and constantly jump at the opportunity to try my luck at creating egg free confections. Some worked great, others... not so much.

Given how easy it is to miss out on recipes that are posted via twitter, it was a delightful surprise to spot a recipe from Oprah.com for a Raspberry buckle cake. Since Raspberries are hard to come by at this time of the year, I substituted a mix of blueberries and chopped strawberries to try her recipe out. Unbelievable that all it had was five ingredients (including the salt!).


Curious to try out variants, I opted for using apples (only because I had a whole bag of organic granny smiths that needed to be used. There's only so much apple salsa that can be scarfed down!)

The minute you think apple, the next word in that train of thought is usually caramel, and by the end of that train of thought, I had my recipe ready (in my head) . All that was needed was a good execution, helped by some handy 'shortcuts', lying around in the form of butter caramel toffees.



Spiced Caramel Apple buckle cake
(recipe inspired by and adapted from Marcia Kiesel &Liz Pearson's recipe on
Oprah.com)

You need:
 1.5 cups (210 gms) self rising flour
1/4 cup melted butter (1/2 a stick , 4 tablespoons)
1 large granny smith apple, peeled, cored & diced into small pieces
1 tub (3.5 cups) Haagen Dazs Dulce de leche (or vanilla) ice cream
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup light brown sugar
6-8 butter caramel toffees
1/2 cup water
(for the spice flavoring)
4 cloves
4 cardamom pods (seeds only)
1 inch piece cinnamon
2 tablespoons fresh ginger extract

1/2 a granny smith apple, peeled, cored and cut into 6 thin slices of uniform size for decorating 
Set the ice cream out on to the counter to melt. Liberally butter the bottom and the sides of a 9 inch baking pan or dish. Pre heat oven to 375 F.

Combine the water, sugar, spices, ginger extract along with the apples in a saucepan. Cook on  gentle heat until the apples are soft. Spoon out the cooked apples into a bowl and strain the sugar syrup to remove the spices. Return the syrup to the saucepan and add the caramel toffees  (those in India wishing to try this out, I'd recommend using those cardamom flavored Parle 'Kismi' brand toffees say about 12 - 15 of the small ones). On low heat, allow the toffees to melt and thicken the syrup to a molasses / treacle consistency.
Add back the cooked apples and allow the mix to cool completely. (you may opt to add the 1/2 stick cold butter into the apple mixture to melt it in lieu of adding it separately)



Sift the self rising flour and  salt into a mixing bowl. Using a hand mixer on low speed, gently whisk in the ice cream, the apple mixture and melted butter until its completely incorporated.



Pour the mixture into the buttered baking dish. Arrange the apple slices as shown.


Place the dish into the preheated oven for about 30 minutes, turning the dish around halfway through the baking until the top of the cake is golden brown.  If the surface seems to be browning too fast, reduce the temperature to 350 F. Remove the cake onto a cooling rack.



Spoon out or cut into  squares and serve warm or at room temperature with a hot cup of coffee.


 Bon appetit!









Comments

  1. If i make a cake so flavorful loaded with all the goodness on earth ( read dulce de leche) my H will probably banish me from the kitchen fearing all the weight gain..... Niv i must say its ok to fear eggs cos i mean who cares! as long as there is dulce de leche and then this cake

    ReplyDelete
  2. LOL.. I think you just gave me one more excuse to skip the eggs!! aargh! but then Dulce de leche definitely is a great reason! thanks Anusha!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Let me know if you can submit a cake recipe for DNS. DNS is a blog cum magazine to support Indian food bloggers.


    Kindly mail me your recipe with a short bio of yours to ver.neha@hotmail.com


    (Make sure the recipe is yours).


    You can submit more than 1 recipe.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear feedback from you, your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sputtering back....

I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been

Product Review: Ninja Mega Kitchen system and a recipe for Masala Dosa

 One of the biggest reasons for attending conferences is the priceless experience of meeting fellow bloggers and get an invaluable exposure to all things  culinary. This includes vendors with new products to savor and get inspiration from. I had no complaints about whatever appliances I had for making traditional Dosa (Traditional South Indian rice & lentil crepes) batter, a sturdy tabletop stone grinder that you could add the Urad dal, turn the timer on , and 30  minutes later, come back to a container full of fluffy, batter with the consistency of whipped egg whites. The The cons of this is the cleaning up, of the various parts, the roller, the grinding bin, the multiple trays on which the rollers need to be placed while transferring the rice & lentil batter, the invariable drips of thick batter on the counter.... you get the point, It takes quite a bit of time. I was pleasantly surprised when the appliance company, Ninja asked me if I'd like to try any of their

Pickling & preserving the Buddha's Hand!

 Got your attention with that sacrilegious sounding title on this post, didn't I? Well, I'm as spiritual as the next person out there, and never in my life will I ever commit that variety of Blasphemy, so nothing to fret about. I still wonder why these curious looking citrus entities (other than the obvious visual reason) were called such. It turns out that these fruits are used as a religious offering to the Buddha. My neighboring Whole Foods Market (which is quite some distance away, in Princeton) had a stock of these weird looking citrus and I must have been the oddball customer who immediately went cuckoo on spotting them. Since I had never seen one before, I immediately went for the biggest fruit with the most tentacles (since they were sold as individual units rather than by weight) The first three 'tentacles' were peeled off for their zest, dried in the oven and went into making a citrus salt for my Food52 Secret Santa .     Making