Apple Cake

My newest favorite dessert. And that's a little weird, considering most of my favorite desserts include lots of chocolate, or icecream, or ummm, chocolate. :) But give it a try anyway.

Okay, so actually the recipe, from a Quick Cooking magazine, is called Cream Cheese Apple Muffins, but I didn’t have a muffin tin with me here in der Schweiz, and I like cake better anyway. But I’ll start out with the original recipe and then tell you what I changed up.

Ingredients:

1 pkg. (3 oz) cream cheese, softened

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1/4 butter or marg, melted

1 Tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp vanilla extract

1-1/2 cups flour

1-1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup diced peeled tart apples

1/2 cup bran flakes

Topping: 1-1/2 tsp sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

In mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, lemon juice and vanilla; beat until smooth. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; stir into cream cheese mixture just until moistened. Fold in apples and bran flakes.

Fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. Combine topping ingredients, sprinkle over batter. Bake at 375 F for 20-25 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack.

Yield: 1 dozen

SO. when I first made this is was right after we got to our apartment. I didn’t have a muffin tin, but it sounded good and it didn’t include any ingredients I can’t get here like corn syrup or brown sugar (okay and actually you can’t get baking powder here either, but I brought some with me because I’m genius like that). I left out the lemon juice, vanilla extract, and bran flakes (because for heaven’s sake I was making a CAKE, not muffins—let us not ever put anything so healthy as bran flakes into our cakes!). Also, I didn’t peel my apples first. I just diced em perty small and they were GREAT! Then I put all the batter into a greased glass pan. I’m not sure what size it is, it’s not as big as 9X13 though. It’s what we got at the second-hand store that we first went to to stock up on needed supplies that we hadn’t brought with us.

And finally, and this is the CRUCIAL part, I served the apple cake in a bowl covered GENEROUSLY with cream. I am my mother’s daughter, after all. Mmmmm, mmmmmmmmmm, MMMMMMMMM!!!

Do give it a try. And let me know how it turns out! En guete!