Very easy Dutch apple cake

Last weekend was, in case you've forgotten, election night. Harvey and I always used to select who we invited to watch the results very carefully. They not only had to share our political persuasion, they also had to be quietly devoted to watching the results. Jonathan deserted me for his own friends, so I had my neighbour over early on, then a close friend joined us.
      I planned to have soup and then finger food for later, but I also wanted to make a cake. As apples are one of the few well-priced fruits around, I thought a Dutch apple cake would be good - but I couldn't find my old recipe. No problem - one quick search online for "Dutch apple cake NZ" (local baking recipes usually work best) and I found exactly what I wanted. The use of melted butter makes it very easy to mix, and thanks to the cinnamon and sugar topping, it doesn't need icing.

Sue's Dutch Apple Cake

Adapted slightly from http://www.tuigarden.co.nz/recipe/sues-dutch-apple-cake

(I don't know who this Sue is - the site says "This apple cake is a favourite supplied by Gemma from the Tui Team.") 

2 eggs

½ cup sugar

125g melted butter

1 c self-raising flour

zested rind of 1 lemon

3 medium apples, peeled and chopped up (my apples weren't very tart, so I added a couple of tablespoons of of juice from the zested lemon)

1 Tbsps cinnamon and 1/3 c sugar, mixed together for sprinkling on top (you may not need all this, but I like it quite thick).

Prepare cake tin, greasing the sides and lining the base with bake paper. (The recipe recommends a ring tin, which gives a higher cake. I used a square tin, lined entirely with bake paper, for a shallow cake which cut into neat squares.)

Set oven to 180C bake (or 170C fanbake).

Melt the butter (a Pyrex jug works well, in the oven or the microwave) and leave it to cool.

Beat the eggs and the sugar together in a largeish bowl, then add the melted butter.

Add the self-raising flour, lemon rind and apples to the mixture, and mix to combine. 

Pour into prepared cake tin. 

Sprinkle with a generous amount of the cinnamon and sugar.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a skewer or thin knife blade inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Serve with plain whipped cream or yoghurt.

This is really good, quite light and yet very moist - a cross between cake and dessert. Once again (sigh) I didn’t get a decent photo before most of the cake got eaten, and I couldn’t copy the one that came with the original recipe.  So here are a couple of photos I found online – the first is a similar cake, and the other is exactly the recipe above, but from the Chelsea Sugar site. 

Mine looked like a cross between the two. I don't think the Chelsea one has been mixed properly, because the apple seems to be all at the bottom, but the topping looks right. 

Tarte tatin - with an Auckland twist

I stayed with my family and with three different friends in Auckland. I'm lucky - they're all really good cooks. On Monday I went to Milford Mall, and saw a display of cookware which included a dish labelled as being for tarte tatin. I'd seen these before but I had never realised that was what they were for. It had odd downward-sloping handles, making it easy to turn the dish over at the end and get the tarte onto a plate - it's often translated as "upside-down apple tart".
             The next day I went to Camille's, and she'd asked a mutual friend round for dinner. On her shelves I saw the same dish. She'd bought it in France, and used it often, but hadn't realised exactly what it was for. So I offered to make a tarte tatin for dessert.

            
I found a Peta Mathias recipe and adapted it a bit, according to what I could remember of the recipe I use in Wellington, which comes from a book brought back for me from the Loire Valley by a friend - The Cuisine of the Kings (with no author's name). It's essential to have a shallow, solid, flat-bottomed pan, preferably with handles, which can be used both on top of the stove and in the oven.
 
Tarte tatin
(the proper name is Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin, the tart of the Misses Tatin, after the sisters who were said to have invented it and served it in their restaurant)
 
1 kg firm, tart apples (Cox's Orange are good, but Granny Smith will do, providing they're fresh and firm) 
75 g butter (this is half the quantity in my French recipe)
50 g sugar
2 sheets frozen puff pastry (If you're clever, make your own)
 
Peel, quarter and core the apples. Thaw the pastry sheets. Preheat the oven to 200C.
Put the butter and sugar into the pan and heat it until the butter is melted.
Fit the apple quarters into the pan, core side down.
Cook them for about 10 minutes until they begin to soften and the butter and sugar begin to caramelize.
Carefully turn them over and cook again while the butter and sugar continue to bubble and caramelize. You need to make sure nothing is burning, so the heat should not be too high, but you want the apples to soften while retaining their shape, and go a lovely golden brown on their rounded side. (My French recipe says to put the dish with the apples into the oven instead - this works okay too, but I got better results doing it on the stovetop.) 
 
Leave the apples to cool a little while you join the pastry sheets carefully together, using a pastry brush and milk, to make a sheet big enough to fit completely over the pan and hang down a bit all round.
Trim it off in a circle around the pan, leaving enough extra to tuck in neatly around the apples.
Place the pastry over the apples and brush the top with milk. Bake for about 15 minutes until golden brown.
Cool for 5 minutes. Place a serving plate over the pan - it should be a little larger than the pan.
Turn the pan over holding the plate in place, so that the pastry is on the bottom and the apples are on top. Serve with cream and/or with this sauce, which is used in my French recipe.
 
Juice of 1 lemon
1 cup apple juice
1 tbsp honey
50 g butter
1/4 tsp each ground cinnamon and nutmeg
 
Mix all ingredients except the spices in a saucepan, bring to the boil and cook for 2 minutes. Blend in the spices.
 

When I made this at Camille's, I didn't have enough apples and they shrank too much when I cooked them. She had a bucketful of feijoas from her tree, so before I put the pastry on, I cut some in half, scooped them out and put them cut side down around the apples to fill up the dish.   
 
 
 
Then I put the pastry on and baked it well.
 

 
The result was fantastic - the delicate, sharp scenty flavour of the feijoas combined perfectly with the caramelly apple. I wish I could grow them in Wellington. And that dish worked so well - it was by far the best tarte tatin I've made. Very satisfying!
 

Hunting humble apple crumble

I don't normally use a recipe for apple crumble, I just guess. But wanting to make a really good one for a weekend visitor, I decided to hunt for guidance on the web.
      As you might expect, apple crumble must be one of the most-posted NZ recipes. What surprised me was how different they all are - not just in ingredients, but in quantities, methods, oven times and temperatures.
       I was struck by how many commercial recipe sites there are, often trying to sound like a real person, and all touting for business. I was shocked - shocked, I say! - to see the New Zealand Women's Weekly featuring a "Classic Apple Crumble", using cans of diced apples. (I expect this kind of heresy from Wattie's Food in a Minute, and sure enough, it had canned apples too, plus jam.) Saving time? Not really - it also says to rub the butter in by hand, when it's much quicker to do it (by careful pulses) in a food processor. I haven't tried melting the butter and stirring it in, as some recipes say - would this work? I'm doubtful.
        The Woolworths recipe uses fresh apples, but tells you to cook them first. So does Jamie Oliver (the only non-NZ recipe I looked at). I thought the whole point was to put fresh sliced apples (maybe with other fruit) under the topping, then cook the whole thing slowly in the oven along with something else that takes a while, like a casserole.
        Oven times and temperatures are another bone of contention. Lots of recipes with precooked apples, or even sometimes with sliced ones, say 20 minutes at 180C, and that's just not long enough. My old Easy As Pie textbook says not to have the oven too hot, or the fruit "will bubble up and spoil the topping" - but Harvey says that's exactly what he wants it to do.
          He's a stickler for tradition - he likes his topping thick, and made with white flour only. Others are more adventurous. As well as the basic butter, sugar (choose your kind) and flour (white or wholemeal, with or without a little baking powder), toppings can include a little or a lot of rolled oats, coconut, ground almonds, and/or spices. The amount of butter varies from skimpy (producing dull, stodgy topping, in my experience) to generous.

Very few recipes give the number of servings. Jamie says his serves 5, but the whole raw topping weighs only 125g - barely a quarter of a cup each, which does seem a bit sparse.
         In the end I went for a Cuisine recipe, because it used fresh, not precooked apples and had a unique variation I wanted to try: mixing the rolled oats with honey and half the butter, melted, then baking them for 20 minutes spread out on a tray lined with baking paper, before mixing them with the butter/flour, sugar, and cinnamon, and cooking for 50 minutes at 180C.
         It tasted good, with a nice toasty flavour, but because the apples weren't proper cooking ones (like Ballarat), I think they needed to cook a bit longer (with foil over the top to stop it getting too brown). And despite its name, we like our crumble a bit less crumbly and more sort of solid. Fewer rolled oats, more flour, maybe more butter.
           If you have a favourite apple crumble recipe you love and swear by, let me know. But please, no canned apples.