mondomulia

When my friends invited me to a Christmas party last weekend, my first thought was "which dessert should I make?"! I really wanted to make gingerbread cookies, I mean just look at how cute these are!! But I am not a huge fan of ginger and assumed my Italian friends wouldn't be either...

Then I found this recipe for Christmas "amaretto" cake (sorry, in Italian only!). My boyfriend fiancé and I love amaretto (biscuits, liquor, ice-cream...you name it!) so I was really keen in trying this out!

And then...my mum saw the recipe, told me it was too complicated and told me she would send me an easy recipe for apple cake! Memories of her delicious "torta di mele" appeared in my mind and at that point I didn't have any doubt, I was going to recreate my mum's "easy to make" apple cake!

Ingredients

* 4 eggs * 4 cups of white sugar * 3 cups of sunflower oil * 7 cups of plain flour * 16 gr of baking powder * 4 russet or yellow apples, chopped in thin slices * raisins * walnuts, chopped finely

According to my mum's recipe, the raisins should be soaked in rum, but you can totally use normal raisins, like I did!

To measure the ingredients, I used a small espresso cup like the one in the photo.

Preparation

With an electric hand mixer, whip the eggs and the sugar. Add the sunflower oil, flour and baking powder. I used one packet of lievito Paneangeli, an Italian brand that can be found online at Nife is Life.

Mix the ingredients together to make a thick dough, hard to stir. 

Grease the cake tin with butter, then cover it with flour. The flour will stick to the butter, remove the excess.

Pour only half of the mixture into the cake tin. Spread the apple slices, raisins and walnuts all over. Then cover it with the other half of your cake mixture.

Each layer of cake mixture should fill about 1 cm of the tin. Don't over fill your tin, otherwise the cake will rise too much and the pastry will cover the taste of the apples!

Cook in the oven at 180° C for about one hour. Do the toothpick test to make sure it is cooked! 

Remove from the oven and leave to cool down. Before serving, sprinkle the top with icing sugar.

Et voilà! Your apple cake is ready. Perfect for breakfast, afternoon tea or dessert!