Jewish Apple Cake

This recipe comes from "The Jewish Holiday Cookbook" by Joan Nathan.

As with many other recipes, this isn't particularly Jewish, except that it doesn't use any dairy, which makes it a nice dessert for a dessert when your meal includes meat.  Kosher rules, you may not know, forbid mixing meat and dairy.  Somewhere in the Torah, it says we're not to boil a kid in its mother's milk, and we've expanded that to say no meat with any dairy at all, just to be on the safe side.

Unless the meat is fish, in which case it doesn't count as meat.  Keeper kosher can be very complicated!

Another note on this recipe - yes, you really don't peel the apples.  I know, I was suspicious, too. But I made a test cake with same apple layers peeled and some unpeeled, and people liked the version with the peels better.  The peels got nice and tender in the baking, and, when I used red Macintosh apples, made for some pretty color in the finished cake, too.

I did find a key point was to use a non-stick bundt pan, greased with Pam with flour in it.  After years of unsuccessful bundt cake attempts, Annette from Shaffer's Cake and Candy Supplies in Berwick told me about this trick, and it worked like a charm - the cake slid right out of the pan!

Also, this recipe makes a LOT of batter. My first effort rose over the pan and spilled through the hole in the middle, where it built into a small tower.  So make sure you put your bundt pan on a cookie sheet your first time.

Ingredients:

5 large apples
2 tsp cinnamon
2 Cups sugar
4 eggs
1 Cup vegetable oil
1/2 Cup orange juice
1 tsp vanilla
3 Cups unsifted flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Core and slice apples into eights. Place in a large bowl and sprinkle with the cinnamon and 5 tablespoons of the sugar.

2. Beat the eggs and gradually add the remaining sugar, oil, orange juice and vanilla.

3. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Combine with egg mixture. (Confession: I never sift them together. I add the baking powder and salt to the liquid and stir them in so they're well incorporated. Then I add the flour gradually. It seems to work fine.)

4. Grease a tube pan and dust with flour.  Better yet, spray with Pam Baking Spray with Flour.

5. Pour 1/3 of the batter into the pan. Layer with 1/3 of the apples. Repeat for two more layers, ending with the apples on top. Bake 1 1/2 hours until golden on top. Let sit a few minutes and then unmold.


Ingredients: