Simply cake

One of the things I love, since moving to France, is having time to do just what I want to do. Okay, we still have things we need to do, but I do feel that now we do more things that we just want to do, and today I wanted to bake a cake.

I had a couple of apples that I thought would be nice to use up, so I went on a search for a recipe. I found a nice tasting one by Nigella, but it needed 8 eggs, which seemed a lot, and seeing as I only had two, that was not an option! I resumed my search using Pinterest, and came across ‘A Simple Apple Cake’. I am normally quite sceptical when something says it’s simple, I often think the word simple has been used because something in the recipe really isn’t, and they’re trying to trick you into doing it anyway. However, this cake really was ‘simple’.

I will share my recipe for it, as I did also change it slightly to suit what I had in my cupboard.

Prepare a 20 cm spring form cake tin. Butter it, and add baking parchment on the bottom. Peel, core and slice 2 large eating apples and sprinkle a bit of lemon juice on them, to prevent them from going brown. Preheat the fan oven to 160°c

Cream together 125g butter (room temperature) with 165g caster sugar. Whisk in 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence, 2 eggs and 125ml of full fat milk (also room temperature). Once mixed, whisk in the flour 225g plain flour and 3 teaspoons of baking powder. Thoroughly whisk.

Pour half the mixture into the tin, and place half the apples on it, then pour on the other half, then arrange the remaining apples on the top. I then added a few walnuts, but you could use almonds if preferred.

Bake in the oven for about 40-45 minutes. We enjoyed our first piece just warm, with some vanilla cream - delicious.