Bramley Apple Cake

The recipe for this moist apple cake was given to be by my parents last year when they came to visit, my mum proclaiming: "This is my very favourite cake!!"

Well, it's taken me until now to get round to making it and I've actually been going on about making it for months but it's been worth the wait.

It is a rather delicious cake - moist, flavoursome, sticky with crisp apples running through it. Also it was really filling, when Hannah and Gray came over for tea I had one slice for pudding with a cuppa and couldn't have managed another mouthful.

It was also a fun cake to make and not too difficult or time consuming. Not much beating of ingredients to be done and once it's all been bunged into the oven there's no icing to do so easy peasy!

The only bit I found a tad difficult was trying to arrange the apple slices at the bottom of the tin (that end up being the top of the cake) in concentric circles and it all ended up looking a bit higgledy piggledy. I think I sliced my apples too thick.

Unfortunately this meant that my cake didn't have the pretty caramelised apple decoration on top of the cake as it should have done as the cake mix seeped down under the apples before cooking. So what we ended up with instead was a layer of sticky, caramelised cake on top which was also quite nice.

Anyway, the cake only lasted two days in our house. Yesterday we picked my mum and dad up from the airport and went back to ours for tea and cake. Roy had forgotten that he'd even given me the recipe and even said "You must write the recipe down for me!" ... Lol. Oh well, at least he enjoyed it!

Recipe:

600g Bramley Apples
The juice of 1/2 a lemon
200g light brown sugar
4 eggs
75g margarine, melted
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
150g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
75g ground almonds

Start by preheating the oven to 180 degrees C and preparing a cake tin by greasing it and lining with greaseproof paper. This seems a little complicated but is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Peel the apples, cut the cores out and slice them into slices about half a centimetre thick. As you can see I think I did mine a little too thick.

Place the apple slices in a bowl and sprinkle with the lemon juice and 37g of the sugar. Give them a bit of a jiggle so they all get a bit of a coating.

Sprinkle the bottom of the greased tin with another 37g of the sugar. This is what will help make the apples at the top of the cake all lovely and caramelised so make sure you have a nice even covering.

Now the tricky part! Arrange the apple slices around the bottom of the tin, overlapping them slightly in concentric circles. Make sure you don't get yourself muddled up like I did - one end of the new apple slice you put in should always be sort of pointing to the middle. Oh and you don't need to use all of the apples here, you probably won't even use half.

In a new bowl, mix the eggs, melted butter, the rest of the sugar, the pinch of salt and vanilla together. Sift in the flour and baking powder followed by the ground almonds.

Stir until you have a lovely golden batter. Now take the rest of the apples and whatever liquid has formed in the bowl and add them to the cake batter before folding together.

Pour the cake batter into the tin that is lined with apples.

The cake is now ready to be put into the oven to bake for 50 minutes.

Once the cake has risen and is beautifully golden brown, take it out of the oven and allow to cool in its tin for a little while.

Turn the cake out onto a board by putting the springform tin upside-down, removing the tin and peeling away the greaseproof paper. You will then have a lovely moist cake with a to-die-for caramelised appley topping. Nom. Serve the cake warm or cold. Warm is best with a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream!