You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I’ll buy you a new car.
~ Harvey Diamond
It’s often been said that women can multitask well. I can tell you now (pardon the pun), multitasking for this woman here is FAR from a piece of cake… this evening, whilst baking a cake and chatting on the phone with my friend Mandy I scored a flour bath, a sore neck and an ugly cake in the process!
To be fair though, it is highly possible that I could’ve somehow accomplished all the above three things even if I weren’t on the phone. :-/
But hey, it all worked out in the end.
The cake in question was birthed from Tessa Kiros’ “Falling Cloudberries”:
#33 Apple cake with toffee topping – Page 269
It involved filling a cake tin with a bed of apple slices and pouring on top of this a smooth batter of soft butter, sugar, milk, vanilla and all – a batter akin to the filling of the most delicious cream puffs your mind can imagine now… it was a sweet, relaxing process…
I had to bake it for 20 minutes more than the book said to do, with foil on top, because when I first took it out it was brown on the top and totally uncooked inside.
*The fork marks you see are the result of my getting carried away with confirming that the cake was uncooked inside when I first took it out.
So after nearly burning my fingers off while covering the cake tin with foil and shoving the brown and uncooked cake back into the oven, and waiting 20 whole minutes…… it was UGLY when I flipped it on to a plate! Look! Argh!!! Look! (Poor Flatmate Jono was here to listen to my argh-ing)… How dare it be ugly!
I also didn’t do the toffee topping, because I was too tired to take a 30-minute walk down to the supermarket to buy the cream we didn’t have. In its place, I sprinkled some muscovado sugar on the top… and in time I collected myself and saved two more presentable slices for my colleague (who inspired my cake-baking tonight in the first place).
Jono and I also ate some sweet moist apple cake with caramel ice cream… so all is well… and now it’s time to do the reading I meant to do about three hours ago. Bonne nuit!
treehousekitchen 
My flatmate makes a similar cake – and while it never turns out looking pretty it sure tastes good! Mm..
I had no idea that you were actually baking!! Lol…!!
Millie – hehe, thanks for your comforting comment!
Mandz – ;-)
I used to ALWAYS get carried away with the old ‘insert a knife to ensure the cake is done’ process then shriek when I’d dug a bit too far! I wouldn’t worry if I were you, perfection is over rated! You know I did a cake similar to this and it wasn’t pretty but it tasted damn good!
:-) Thanks for your comment, am encouraged! Here’s to lots of yummy cakes to come.
Nice! This my family’s treasured apple cake recipe from my grandma:
http://michaelbeyer.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/grandmas-slab-apple-cake/
I have the same cookbook and I just made that same apple cake a couple of nights ago. I’m glad I’m not the only one who got an ugly cake. I thought I made a mistake or something! No wonder the book doesn’t have a picture of the recipe!
I did make that toffee sauce, though. And… it was the BEST TASTING CAKE EVAR! You should definitely try the toffee sauce next time. It adds such a sweet creamy flavor to the cake, as well as adding moisture (not that the cake really needs any more.) Though I would suggest poking holes all over the cake before pouring the sauce on, so it can penetrate throughout. You will not regret it!
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