Low-fat apple cake
For the past few weeks I've spent some time at the weekend making a cake. The same cake every time: once I find a recipe I like I tend to stick with it for a while.
It's an adaptation of a recipe from delicious. magazine, although I can't find it on the website. The idea is that you replace most of the fat element from a normal cake recipe with pureed fruit and use wholemeal flour instead of the bleached variety, making it a 'healthy cake'. Of course, it still has a cartload of sugar in it and the fruit's probably cooked so much it loses most of the goodness but it certainly does have far fewer calories than traditional cakes. The original recipe included a lemony icing but I have dispensed with that because it just didn't seem to go with the cake!
I'm not really one for paying attention to quantities; I hardly ever weigh or measure anything when I am cooking. But for cakes and pastries one just has to because the results are weird and unexpected if one just guesses. So here goes with the boring formalities:
100g of either plain or wholemeal flour (or half of each)
100g of caster sugar
50g of raisins
25g of walnut pieces broken up into even smaller pieces
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon (ish) of ground cinnamon
2 large Bramley cooking apples
A bit of sunflower oil (around 25ml)
Phew! That's that over! Now the far more interesting bit.
To begin, peel the apples and chop them into small pieces, then cook them in a saucepan with a splash of hot water over a low heat. You're basically trying to break them down into a mush. When they're done, leave them to cool completely. While they're cooking you can pre-heat the oven to about 180 degrees (is that roughly gas mark 4? I can never remember!)
In the meantime, weigh all the dry ingredients and mix them together. Once the apple has cooled down, weigh out 250g of it and add it to everything else with a little bit of sunflower oil. It's approximately 25ml of oil which is such a small amount it's actually quite tricky to measure! I tend to sort of add it gradually until I have something resembling a wetter-than-normal cake mixture; if it looks a bit like wallpaper paste you are probably on the right track.
I use a loaf tin to cook this in - it's approximately 10cm x 20cm. There's probably a proper, official size for things like that but I know nothing about cake tins! Anyway - grease the tin liberally and dump in the mixture, then bake it at the bottom of the oven for about an hour. Stick a wooden skewer or toothpick into the centre to test whether or not it's cooked - if it comes out clean you're good to go, but if it brings mush and goo you need to cook it for another ten minutes.
The secret of this cake is not to be impatient and greedy (yes, I learnt that from personal experience!) and to let it cool sufficiently before trying to cut yourself a slice. Let it cool down in the tin for ten minutes or so before turning it out onto a wire cooling tray ... because we all have one of those lying around, of course! I usually use the metal shelf bit from my grill tray, personally! Either way it needs to be cooling down from above and below, because if you try to cut it while it's warm it'll be too soft and you'll just get a mushy, squished wedge (which is still delicious with a cup of tea but won't win any prizes for presentation).
If you've got the willpower and discipline this cake will last for several days wrapped in foil and a great big slice is ideal for elevenses!
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