MAKES 1 LARGE CAKE
When I was growing up, my Grandma Mary would always make this cake for my grandad’s birthday. Mary would organise an afternoon family gathering and we’d wait impatiently for Grandad to do another turn around the field on the tractor before coming in for his cake. Keswick is a variety of cooking apple, you could use any other variety of cooking apple. We always ate this cake warm with pouring cream.
Ingredients
- 250g self-raising flour
- 250g golden caster sugar
- 3 medium eggs
- 175g butter, melted
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp almond oil
- ½ tsp almond extract
- 275g Keswick apples, peeled, cored and sliced
- 30g flaked almonds
- 100ml pouring cream, to serve (optional)
Method
- Preheat the oven to 170°C/fan 150°C/gas 3 and line a 20cm cake tin with baking parchment.
- Beat together all the ingredients except the apples and flaked almonds. Add half the mixture to the prepared tin, add the sliced apples and then tip in the rest of the cake batter.
- Sprinkle with the flaked almonds and bake in the oven, checking after 1 hour. The cake takes a long time to cook because of all the fruit in the middle; in my oven it tends to take about 1 hour 15 minutes. A skewer inserted in the middle of this cake will always come out slightly moist so the acid test for cake cookery isn’t that useful. Cooking for 1¼ hours should mean the cake is cooked through. You can tell when it’s done, though, as it will start to come away at the edges.
- If desired, serve with the cream to pour over.
Recipes and photographs are from Roots by Tommy Banks, published in hardback by Orion, RRP £25.