We found a few apples in our kitchen that had clearly overstayed their welcome. So we rummaged around for a few basic ingredients and made a quick and fun apple cake - just like Papa remembers from his childhood. Here it goes:
Lily prepared two round cake dishes by buttering them up and
dusting them with flour. (Papa remembers the cake to be baked in a huge rectangular form and then cut up in small rectangular pieces.)
Then we pealed all the
apples, about eight of them
, removed any bad spots, and sliced them up.
Then Lily doused them in the juice of
1 lemon. (Lily said that if your roll the lemon first a bit on the counter you can get much more juice out. No idea what culinary school she went to but it worked wonders.)
We turned the oven to 350F and mixed up
250 g butter,
200 g sugar, and a dash of
salt and
vanilla extract until it was all creamy.
Then Lily added
5 eggs, one by one, while we continued mixing.
She mixed
250 g flour with
1 teaspoon of baking powder and added it to the mixture, whipping it up one more time.
Then we spread the dough into the pans and
piled the apples on top. Lily wanted to do it lightly with a pretty pattern like her aunt Tilla does it. Papa decided his sister doesn't know what she is talking about and packed them all tight and smothered them with a layer of
almond slices.
We stuck the two cakes into the oven for about 30 minutes. We checked with a knife, poking it into the cakes to see if it withdrew dry.
We added a little
powder sugar.
Of course the best would be to add either some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream or both. But since we didn't have either, we dug in without remorse. It was perfect.
Nothing better than watching the Winter Olympics on TV and eating German Apfelkuchen!
