We’ve been getting lots of apples and pears in our box of local fruit and vegies from Food Connect, and I used some of the older ones to make this apple cake, which I adapted from a Smitten Kitchen recipe (yes, my favourite source of cake recipes online). I’ve halved the sugar in the original recipe, as two cups in a cake with fruit in it is just too sweet for me. The apples cook beautifully in the cake, covered in a cinnamon and sugar mixture, and this is a lovely moist cake perfect for afternoon tea.

ingredients:
6 apples, or a mixture of apples and pears
1 tablespoon cinnamon
5 tablespoons brown sugar
2 3/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup vegetable oil (I used rice bran oil)
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup orange juice
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 180C, and lightly grease a springform pan. Chop the apples into chunks, and stir in a bowl with the cinnamon and sugar.

Stir together the flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the oil, orange juice, sugar and vanilla. Stir the wet ingredients into the flour mixture. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing together well. Presumably there’s some reason for doing this, but I’m not sure what – it would be simpler to just whisk them into the wet ingredients.

Pour half the mixture into the springform pan, and spread it evenly. Gently spread half the apples over the cake mixture, and spoon the remaining mixture over the apples. Arrange the remaining apples across the top. Bake for about 1 1/2 hours, or until a skewer comes out clean. The cooked apples do make the inside of the cake a bit smoodgy, so keep that in mind when you’re testing.