Apple Cake with Lemon Sauce

Apple picking! Hooray autumn! Thank bloody goodness. I am practically giddy about the crisp, cool, sunny weather. I kicked off autumn this year with a day of apple picking and baking. Regrettably autumn only lasts about 4 days in D.C., days on which I can stand in the sun in a light sweater and breathe in the sickly sweet smells of rotting leaves, before the temperature drops to 40 or below, and I have to dig out the scarves and winter coats. Inconceivable! I do my best to encourage my own little mental lapses, pretending that autumn is a real season in this swampland. I bake as many spicy, sour-sweet recipes full of pumpkins, cranberries and apples, as I can. (And for the record, my love of autumn has nothing to do with the fact that so many of my favorite seasonal flavors translate so harmoniously into desserts. Pure coincidence). Mostly, each autumn I'm determined to make the season last a little bit longer than it did the year before, mostly.

First up, is another recipe card from Great-Grammie's recipe box. After a few hitches earlier this week with her fig square recipe, I thought I would go with an easy one. (I'm coming back to those fig squares, even if I have to make several batches to get it right!) The original apple cake recipe was a little fuzzy on the details, listing "apple slices" and "lemon sauce" but not including the number of apples or how to make the lemon sauce. (I think the lemon sauce recipe may be lost to the annals of cookery). Honestly, as Great-Grammie's recipes go, a few missing instructions are usually the least of my worries.

I was surprised how great this cake came out. While I was mixing the batter, it seemed a little plain; I was worried it wouldn't have enough flavor. I couldn't have been more wrong. The cake itself was light and bouncy, so much so, it was tricky to get out of the pan, squishing down under the pressure of my spatula and popping right back up when I took the spatula away. The apples were also a surprise. I thought they would be dried out, which they were a little, but they were still crisp and juicy when I bit into them. The cinnamon and lemon sauce gave everything a little depth and moisture, which made me want to lick my fingertips and dab up any stray, sticky crumbs. Now I understand what Mom meant when she said, "This cake never got cold in our house."

Apple Cake
(Adapted from Great-Grammie's recipe)

1/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar, plus 2 tablespoons for topping
2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs, well beaten
7/8 cup milk (2% or whole)
2 small apples, cored and sliced (I used Jonagold)*
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Lemon Sauce
(Adapted from Bon Appetit, December 1998)

1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
3/4 cup water
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 1 or 2 lemons)
2 or 3 teaspoons grated lemon peel

Cake
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8x8-inch baking dish. In a large bowl, cream together butter and 1/2 cup sugar. In a medium bowl, mix together flour, salt and baking powder. Mix eggs, milk and dry ingredients with creamed butter and sugar alternatively. Pour batter into greased baking pan. Press apple slices into batter in concentric circles, starting at the outside then moving into the middle. Mix together 2 tablespoons sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over cake. Bake 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve with lemon sauce.

*To keep your apple slices from turning brown while they wait to be added to your cake, put them in a bowl of water with a couple of splashes of lemon juice. I cut up my apples last, but, of course, forgot to preheat the oven, so they had to wait a bit before being added to the cake.

Lemon Sauce
In a small saucepan, mix together sugar and cornstarch; add water and bring to a boil. Boil for a few minutes until the mixture gets thick. Add lemon juice and grated peel. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature. Spoon over pieces of cake.

Makes about 9 servings.

Orange Cranberry and Wheat Germ Bread

For some reason, I am a bit of a klutz in the kitchen. I like to think that in the rest of my life, while I am not exactly graceful, I don't spill things on myself or fall down - not very often, anyway. I am very proud of this fact. However, get me in a kitchen and something is almost always bound to go wrong. This weekend it was a doozy, as I attempted to (and eventually succeed) in throwing together this munchable bread recipe from Great Grammie's recipe box.

It's a quick bread. What could possibly go wrong, right? Well, first, I was so darn excited to make this recipe, I yanked my bag of frozen cranberries out of the freezer and spilled cranberries all over my kitchen, spraying them like a bag of marbles at the feet of a villain in a kids' movie. I gathered them up gleefully, laughing at what felt like the lamest mini Easter egg hunt ever and giggling audibly whenever I found a particularly well hidden berry. (Let's hope I found them all).

As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, shortly after I put the bread in to bake and happily settled down to catch up on some Netflix, I realized my second mistake. The sugar! Yup, you guessed it. I completely forgot to add the sugar. (Sigh). Boyfriend and I apprehensively waited for the bread to finish, took it out, let it cool and adventurously cut off a couple of slices. Two words: dense and salty. Needless to say, after washing down the tough bread wads and tossing the whole thing in the trash bin, I started all over again.

Made the correct way, the bread goes like this:

Cranberry Wheat Germ Bread
(adapted from Great Grammie's recipe)

2 cups sifted flour
1 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 salt
1 cup cranberries, halved
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup wheat germ
3 tbsp grated orange peel
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 cup warm water
2 tbsp vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, soda and salt. Stir in cranberries, pecans, wheat germ and orange peel. Combine egg, orange juice, water and oil. Add to flour mixture. Stir just enough to moisten ingredients. Spoon into greased loaf pan. Bake for an hour. Cool 5 minutes in pan. Remove from pan and cool completely on rack.

Great Grammie really knew her stuff when it came to this bread. It is wicked yummy and it has the double bonus of iron, a slew of vitamins and oodles of fiber, so it's healthy, too. Well, healthier than you average breakfast bread anyway. In fact, the only problem I have with this recipe, if you can even call it a problem, is the better part of a jar of wheat germ now residing in my fridge. Any ideas?

Great Grammie O'Keefe's Recipe Box: Starlight Mint Surprise Cookies

(Secret goodness hidden inside)

On one of my recent trips back up to Boston, Mom gave me an absolutely priceless gift, Great-Grammie O'Keefe's recipe box. Perhaps most notable is the fact that the recipes are about 90% desserts. (In fact, Mom specifically advised me to avoid any recipe that was not dessert related, because she couldn't vouch for its flavor and/or outrageous caloric content). The box has an entire section dedicated to frostings. Unbelievable. While many of the recipes have been typed up on index cards (nice!), some are handwritten in an elaborate script, from which I decode phrases like: "bake until done," or "add nuts." Great Grammie also liked to flagrantly omit ingredients until the point in the recipe that one would add them... because everyone had a double-boiler of melting chocolate going all the time, right? (Always read a recipe all the way through before you attempt it. Good advice for everyone). Despite the occasional frustration, the real feeling I take away from these recipes is that of following clues around Great Grammie's kitchen and the thrilling sensation of unlocking her baking secrets. I plan to try many of her recipes this year. I hope you like them, too. 

From what Mom has told me, I am assuming that Starlight Mint Surprise Cookies were once a very common homemade cookie a la Tollhouse. A quick search on the Interweb turned up a bunch of similar the-way-my-mom-used-to-make-'em type recipes. The original recipe calls for Rockwood Chocolate Mint Wafers, but I couldn't find them anywhere. Mom tells me that Rockwood Chocolate Mint Wafers were similar to Girl Scouts Thin Mints, but smaller. Since I covet my seasonally-available Thin Mints like the last tube of toothpaste on Battlestar Galactica, I opted to put Andes Creme de Menthe mints in the middle of my cookies. I wasn't sure how much dough to wrap around each mint, so the first batch baked up bigger than I expected.

The dough itself is a pretty basic cookie dough. Despite the fact that I have made several kinds of cookies over the last year, I'm not a cookie person. Sugar, peanut butter, and shortbread cookies are just plain boring and not worth the calories. When it comes to your standard cookie dough recipe, I'd much rather sit down with a tube of the raw, premade stuff, pop in a movie, and go to it, preferably with my fingers. But this recipe was delicious. The cookies were a scrumptious combination of firm and chewy, with a great sugary taste, without seeming like a ball of sugar. And they were easy!

Starlight Mint Surprise Cookies  

adapted from Great Grammie's recipe

Makes about 4 1/2 dozen

3 cups sifted flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tbsp water

1 tsp vanilla

1 package Andes mints

Pecans halves

Directions: 

1. Sift together first three ingredients in a medium bowl. Cream together butter and two sugars. Add eggs, water and vanilla to butter and sugars and beat well. Gradually mix in dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Cover and chill the dough for at least 2 hours.   

2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Enclose each mint in about 1 tbsp of chilled dough. Place on a greased cookie sheet about 2 inches apart. Top each cookie with a pecan half. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes.

P.S. Great Grammie's recipe called for walnuts, but a) I like pecans better, and b) I already had pecans in the house, so I did a mix to compare. I am sure you can guess which I liked better.