SemiAntics

We tried out a new recipe this Christmas. It was a little ironic because the recipe is supposed to be a Hanukkah recipe. Anyways…we tried our hands at making Apple Cake. Nathaniel and I, being the almost-teetotalers that we are, were very excited that the recipe called for Apple Brandy. This necessitated a trip to the ABC store where a bottle of Captain Apple Jack was purchased. Unfortunately, neither Nathaniel nor I read the recipe very carefully, sooo we missed the part where it said we only needed 1/2 teaspoon of brandy. That fact put a damper on our $15 purchase and the bragging associated with it. Oh well, I guess we’ll be making a lot of Apple Cakes. We have a lot of brandy to use up, and the cake turned out really well.

The recipe came from the New York Times.

Babette Friedman’s Apple Cake

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9-inch springform pan.

2. Mix the butter (softened), 1 1/3 cups of sugar, and salt together until blended. Add eggs and mix until smooth. Fold in flour and baking powder and thoroughly mix. Fold in a few apples (we folded in two). Spread batter evenly in pan.

3. In a large bowl, toss the remaining apples with the brandy, ginger and cinnamon. Arrange the apple slices in closely fitting concentric circles on top of dough. Sprinkle 1 Tablespoon sugar over the apples.

4. Bake until the apples are golden and tender and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake dough comes out clean. About 50 minutes (It was over an hour in our oven).

Our Notes

Well, it happened. One of our old junk buckets from 1994 finally gave out. Nathaniel’s Mazda is no longer with us. Now we have a nice shiny 2007 Mazda6! It has 20,900 miles on it.