Autumn Recipe - Dorset Apple Cake

By Gem - 08:30:00

I love to taking my baking into work. There's only myself and Martyn at home and if I bake I end up eating cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner before it goes stale. By taking it into work I get all the fun of baking but without eating cake until I'm about to burst. My boss knows I love to bake and had a glut of apples in his garden this year and tasked me with finding a way to use them in a bake. I didn't want to make a crumble or a pie so I delved into some of my recipe books and came across a recipe for Dorset Apple Cake. It is so perfectly Autumnal and fills the house with the most amazing spiced smell.

Ingredients

225g self-raising flour
2 tsp ground cinnamon
225g Bramley or Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and diced
100g sultanas
115g unsalted butter, diced and chilled, plus extra for greasing
115g light brown sugar
1 large egg, beaten
6-8 tbsp milk
2 tbsp demerara sugar

Method

Heat the oven to 180C/160C fan/ gas 4. Grease and line a 20cm cake tin with baking paper.

Mix the flour and cinnamon together in a large bowl. Add the butter and rub into the flour using your fingers, until it looks like breadcrumbs. Stir in the light brown sugar. Beat in the egg followed by 6 - 8 tbsp of milk until you get a smooth, thick batter.

Add the apples and sultanas and mix to combine. Scrape the batter into your prepared tin and gently level out. Sprinkle over the demerara sugar and bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes or until golden and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Allow to cool in the tin for 15 minutes and then carefully turn out onto a wire rack to cool further.

Best served still warm with a little custard. (I like a lot of custard, so thick you can slice it)

This cake is typically baked in a deep round tin but I didn't have one of those, I'm one for breaking the rules anyway... Let me know if you try baking this cake yourself. You won't be disappointed, I promise.