One of the nice thing about Dan Lepard’s recipes is that they’re often so quintessentially British, despite the fact that he started life as a Melbourne boy. This delicious rye apple cake recipe is a good example – with the addition of golden syrup, apple, rye flour and almonds, the end result is a cross between a tea cake and a muffin, albeit with better keeping properties than either.
I had everything on hand – Kevin Sherrie’s organic rye flour, unblanched almond meal from Santos Trading (a rare and exciting discovery) and crisp, new season pink lady apples.
The recipe is here, and I followed the methodology exactly, with a couple of substitutions. Instead of muscovado sugar, I used soft brown sugar, and I replaced 50g of the flaked almonds with 50g of unblanched almond meal. I baked the cake in my trusty Chicago Metallics cake tin and it took 45 minutes to cook to perfection in my 175C fan assisted oven. Note that some bakers on Dan’s forum needed to extend the baking time for this recipe.
We had this for dessert last night, but it was even better this morning with a hot cup of tea!
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Guess what I made this evening…Apple cake! I stored the skin and core for my pectin making…this weekend, I hope. I plan on having a slice to take to work tomorrow morning too! Lovely. I still have a few more apples to work my way through so hopefully I’ll be able to think of some more creative things to do!
Apple pie, Oz! There can never be enough of it in our house! Before we made pies, we used to make apple butter with all the pulp, which is delicious, but didn’t prove popular with the tribe. I do use it a bit in cooking, though, and it’s the perfect accompaniment to roast pork…
It’s still yesterday here, so as a timetraveller from September, what do I do with the rest of the apples, I have just made another couple of these cakes to give away… there are apples everywhere…is there a secret OZ apple cake recipe that I am missing, one that I could combine with the apple lemon curd? Love the pictures, I ran out of almonds and sub’d a bit of ground up hazlenuts, and had to flake the almonds by hand which was a bit of a chore. It definitely takes longer at 170, about another 8 minutes. So you did the right thing cooking it a bit hotter! Last year I made apple chutney with some apple balsamic vinegar, which was great, but I have been eating it for a year now, and there is still a jar or two in the garage….
Jo, I know you’re not a fan of pastry, but when we have a glut of apples to use up, I always make apple pies. The other recipe we make is Pete’s chilli jam, which is a kind of capsicum relish, but it uses quite a lot of apples as well.
And of course, there’s always pectin, but that leaves all the pulp. Oh, there is one thing you can do – sometimes when we have a surplus, we peel, core and slice the apples, then dip them in a weak solution of vitamin C (crush 1500mg per 3 tablespoons of water) and then freeze them. The Vit C keeps them lily white in the freezer and we can’t taste it in the defrosted apples. There’s more info here.
Celia
Nice! This my family’s treasured apple cake recipe from my grandma:
http://michaelbeyer.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/grandmas-slab-apple-cake/
[…] got the original recipe here and hubby did all the […]
AWESOME cake! Awesome Recipe – Thank you for sharing!
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for letting me know! :)