I just baked an amazing cake. With no hands. Well, with hands and a spoon, but no no mixer, even though the recipe called for it. Apple Cinnamon Cake. Yummy.
You won’t find the recipe in a Martha Stewart cook book- the Apple Cake (which I renamed Apple Cinnamon cake) is straight out of “Betty Crocker Cookbook” which I have used to cook with since I was a kid. The cake is tremendously fattening- there isn’t a calorie count listed, but I am guessing that each serving size (of course there are only four for my 13 x 9 in. pan, right?), there are 1,500 calories. Which is why I didn’t eat as much dinner as I thought I would. My apologies to the cook.
This isn’t the first apple recipe I’ve tried. I had an entire box to play with. Since I am not as firm of a believer in “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”, I didn’t eat an apple a day, so decided to instead try out a few desserts.
The first apple dessert I tried was “Apple Crisp.” It was good, but not nearly as delicious as I remember from when my Grandma baked it in my childhood. The recipe was also in the fantabulous cook book, but I think I would have preferred the “Baked Apples” which are basically the same recipe, but not nearly as fattening.
Next, I tried apple muffins. I have to say that my berry muffins are truthfully much more tasty than the apple muffins I baked. The recipe, also from “Betty Crocker Cook Book”, called for cinnamon, but when I bit into my first muffin, I could barely taste the cinnamon in it. The recipe didn’t call for any vanilla, but after eating the cake today, I came to the conclusion that the recipe really needed more cinnamon and should have had vanilla as an ingredient.
I have yet to bake an apple pie, and am not yet convinced that Betty Crocker is the way to go for my very first apple pie. I don’t want to use a ready-made crust and I need a flaky crust that my imaginary customers would keep coming back for. It is, afterall, the great apple experiment and I have to keep my standards high. If you know of a good recipe that you are willing to share—I know how secretive people get about their pie recipes—please let me know.
Pic from Flickr by selma90.