Fresh Apple Cake

I was born and raised in the Midwest and try to live my life by showing appreciation for the simple things like: good food, health, love of family, and friends. And maybe it's those Midwestern values that draw me towards blue collar pastries.

For example, my father worked the steel mills of East Chicago until he retired. Our family was never one for fancy cakes and such. My favorite childhood memories involve cold winter mornings, hot cups of coffee, and splendid coffee cakes. I can still remember my mom telling me to add more milk to my coffee because it was too dark. I still enjoy coffee cake to this day, but the portions are smaller and occur less frequently.

I recently baked this lovely cake that is spiked with fresh apples, dark raisins, and walnuts. It's incredibly moist, hearty, and fills one's kitchen with a wonderful autumnal scent. It is a magnificent cake to start the morning off with, whether one drinks coffee or not.

Print recipe: Fresh Apple Cake
One Year Ago: No Bake Mini Cheesecakes

Pumpkin Raisin Bread

This recipe is from a baking book Sur La Table recently released. And the recipe appeared in Gourmet or Bon Appetit, don't worry I'll figure it out by the end of the post.

Back to the bread. Whenever a recipe states that it yields one loaf and there is a lot of batter, my inner baker says "...no, no that's too much batter for one pan!" But like the rule follower that I am, I always add the batter to the pan which proceeds to spill over sometime during the baking.

So when this particular recipe said the same thing and the batter amount was startling, I still followed the rules. But made a promise to myself that if the batter spilled over I would never over rule my inner baker voice again.

Even as I placed the pan in the oven I said to myself "...this is going to spill over and make a mess in the oven." Well, this recipe is either fool proof or the baking gods were feeling sorry for me, because it came out of the oven perfect. With a shameless high dome, a slightly cracked top showing a sneak peak of it's yummy insides, and perfect square ends.

I was so impressed with the results that I went to the bookstore to see this book (The Art And Soul Of Baking by Cindy Mushet) for myself. And have now added it to my wish list for Christmas. Yes, my mind is already on Christmas but more on that later. For now enjoy the Perfect Pumpkin Raisin Bread.

P.S. I am not a fan of walnuts, so I replaced the "called" walnut amount with raisins.

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Apple Raisin Muffins

Have you ever wanted to bake something and didn’t have all the ingredients? Did you go ahead with substitutions and hoped it would come out? That’s where I found myself last night.

I wanted to have a muffin for breakfast, a raisin muffin, to be exact. I searched through all my cookbooks and I did find recipes. But the ingredients were another story. My next step was the internet, where I found a recipe that was simple, yet I was still missing some the ingredients. I crossed my fingers and hoped that all the substitutions would yield me an edible muffin.

What I got was a large humble muffin, whose taste surpasses any of those overpriced dry muffins available at coffee houses. Oh, is this muffin soft and so good. The recipe originally called for 12 muffins, but I wanted big breakfast muffins, so I used a Texas muffin pan. I still cannot believe how well the muffins turned out. I guess if a recipe is well written substitutions will still yield one a good result.

If find yourself wanting a muffin but lack all the appropriate ingredients feel free to change out the wheat flour, half & half, apple, raisins and whatever else you don’t have. I did and it worked out just fine. The original recipe can be found here in case your are interested.


Ingredients:

1 ½ cups of whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon of vanilla
½ cup of sugar
1 large tart apple, peeled & thinly sliced
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/2 cup of raisins
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
¼ teaspoon of salt
½ cup of melted butter
¼ cup of fat-free half and half
1 large egg

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400F degrees and line a Texas-size muffin pan with 6 muffin liners, set aside. In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Set aside. In a 2-cup measuring cup whisk together the melted butter, half and half, vanilla and egg. Add the wet ingredients to the flour mixture and combined until just moistened. Fold in the apples and then the raisins. Divide the batter among the liners and bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.