Cake is the New Black

Let me tell you something about recipes: they lie.  Not about the ingredients or the methods or the order of the steps - those are all important.  Those can be jumbled or unclear, but that's another matter.  The lies come before all that.  The lies lie in the prep time.

When I say that the prep time is a lie (insert 'the cake is a lie' reference at will), I am of course exaggerating.  The lies aren't malicious, and in ideal circumstances they might even be truths.  The prep time is more like a fantasy, or that maybe-just-possibly-if-you-work-really-hard-barely-attainable goal.  If you've followed a recipe one hundred times you're bound to get quicker at it, or if you have a minion to set everything up for you before you start that would certainly speed things up too.  But if you've baked something one hundred times (or if you have a minion) then you probably aren't even looking at the recipe any more.  Recipes are for those of us who don't know what we're doing, and therefore if they insist on providing a prep time, they should tell it like it is: 'It will be an hour before this cake is even in the oven, and you'll probably be wearing half of it before it gets there'.  Then again, it could just be me.

Just after finishing off a large bag of apples making a pie, I saw this recipe from BBC Food and knew that I wanted to try it.  When I had another enormous bag of apples (another pie, two galettes and this cake's worth of apples, to be specific), I did.  It was my turn to bake for a class, I was low on time and the recipe said under thirty minutes to prep - perfect!

It wasn't perfect.  The cake was delicious and well worth it in the end, but between washing, coring and peeling the apples, and then waiting for them to become 'fluffy', it took much longer than the estimation provided in the recipe.

What are fluffy apples?

To be fair, I may be at least partly to blame for the extra time.  To start, when I saw how few apples 300g was (somewhere in the vicinity of two), I doubled the recipe.  I also made a mistake at this point in that when I read 'add the apples, water and sugar' I added all the sugar, when really only the castor sugar was meant to go in.  Oh well!  I can't imagine that the brown sugar affected the cook time though.

Are they fluffy yet?

I saw steam in the saucepan and covered them for 3-4 minutes as per the recipe, but when I took the lid off I didn't see much difference.  I left them to their simmering, and it did appear that the apples were softening (getting fluffier?) and that the sauce was thinning, but I still wasn't really sure what was meant by cook them 'until thick and fluffy'.  Then I bothered to read the next step, which was to beat them to remove lumps, and realized that I was essentially supposed to be making applesauce.  At that point I left them to continue simmering for I can't remember how long while I moved on to the second component of the batter.

First I was supposed to beat the butter and brown sugar, at which point I realized that I'd messed up and put the brown sugar in the sauce pan with the apples, so I beat the butter on its own instead.  The downside of this was that there was no sugar to create air pockets in the butter to lighten it, but the cake was light enough in the end so I don't think it truly suffered from the misstep.  Nor did it suffer from golden syrup that was past its expiration date.  I'd never used golden syrup before, but had inherited some from a friend and it had been hanging out in the back of my cabinet since then.  Since it was a syrup I wasn't at all concerned about it aging, nor was I surprised or worried to find crystallization inside the can.  I was, however, surprised by the presence of an expiration date on the lid.  Since I didn't want to kill anyone, I naturally sought the advice of google, who provided me with many instructions on how to age golden syrup, some references to Heston Blumenthal's use of 60 or 70 year old syrup and word straight from Lyle's factory that at least one of their higher-ups would only eat syrup that was past the 'best before'; apparently, like wine and cheese, this stuff gets better with age.  Remember that at your next dinner party.

In addition to the golden syrup, eggs and vanilla are beaten into the butter, followed by the flour.  The recipe calls for self-raising, but I don't keep that around, so I mixed baking powder into my flour before incorporating it (two teaspoons to one cup of flour).  After adding the flour, it was back to the apples.

Applesauce is fluffy right?

I had turned the heat off on the apples so they didn't overcook while I was distracted, and added the all-important calvados.  Then I beat them with a hand mixer, in a sauce pan that was definitely too shallow for such an activity... but what's a little extra laundry anyway?  Adding the baking soda was probably the best bit - I was not at all ready to feel like a mad scientist before the apples started fizzing and foaming, but I did!  And I liked it.  And maybe I am.

The frothing applesauce had to be added to the rest of the batter quickly, before it deflated, and mixing had to be similarly swift, but also gentle so as to not pop all the bubbles.  All together it didn't look very pretty, although it did smell nice.  Thankfully the oven did wonders for its image.

The cake had to come out of the oven after about 30 minutes to be beautified with apples, and I used more of the same Bramley since I did not follow the recipe's advice to buy a Cox's Orange Pippin especially for the purpose.  I don't know the reason for the different variety on top, but I don't think that it mattered.

While the cake was baking, I made the caramel sauce.  I had an idea that caramel sauce was difficult to make, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find straightforward and relatively quick.  You simply melt brown sugar and butter, add double cream (and in this case calvados), and stir.

I stirred constantly to prevent burning, but kept it over a low heat for sufficiently long to feel that it would be a nice thick sauce.  Mission accomplished.  I could stand a spoon in it after overnight refrigeration, and it had to be reheated for use the next day.

This sauce was a winner, possibly even the star of the cake.  The new mission is to think of something else to pair it with, maybe a brownie-shaped something...

Unlike the recipe for the cake itself, I did not double the caramel recipe.  In hindsight if I had I could have been enjoying it for days (smeared on shortbread perhaps? or over some vanilla bean ice cream? excuse me, I'll be in my happy place now...), but in reality there was more than plenty for the cake with just a single batch.

While I did find this cake to be more of a time commitment than I'd been anticipating, the recipe itself was not too difficult, no surprises (apart from fizzing fluffy apples), and the result was totally worth the effort (and the laundry).