I Made Mutherfuckin' Apple Cake and It Was Goddamned Delicious
In DepthWelcome to Better Than It Looks, a series in which we discuss the recipes we tried (and maybe failed) to execute, and the foods that were served to us by someone perhaps more talented than ourselves.
Despite a few years spent working at a bakery, and a past aspiration to become a pastry chef, these days, I barely bake. The precise degree to which you have to follow a recipe deters me, and I also don’t have a particularly intense sweet tooth. But a trip upstate a few weekends ago to go apple picking left me with, yes, a bevy of apples and no interest in keeping the doctor that far away. Per a recommendation from a friend who has not steered me wrong in the past with regarding fruit cakes via Smitten Kitchen (seriously, do this strawberry cake in the summer, it’s super easy and amazing), I took on the apple cake challenge.
To be honest, the meticulousness with which our good friend Deb Perelman approaches her recipes is not often for me. I find myself skipping steps she suggests, never to find out whether roasting the garlic exactly that way and then coating the pasta made much of a difference in the overall flavor. With a dinner, that’s fine, but as we all know, if you don’t use enough baking soda while baking (or, god forbid, accidentally use powder), you’re doomed. But I didn’t want a crumble or a pie, I wanted something new, and so after skipping over Deb’s bevy of apple cake options, I settled on the friend-recommended Sunken Apple and Honey Cake.