Gooey Apple Cinnamon Cake

What do you do when you dont have a muffin tray? You make a cake instead!

We’ve made cake since we didn’t have the moulds for muffins.

You will need

 - 2 apples

- 1 tablespoon of cinnamon powder (cinnamon sticks can also be ground into this)

- 1 cup sugar

- A handful of brown sugar

- Quarter teaspoon salt

- Unsalted butter

- 1 egg

- 1 teaspoon baking powder

- 1 cup regular flour (maida)

- 1 cup wheat flour

- Curd

- And an oven

You will also need the basic other stuff like bowls, cutlery, plates and a baking dish.

If you have a tablespoon of cinnamon power, great. If not, take the sticks and grind them. Remember we’re aiming for a tablespoon of powder, not chunks or pieces. So you will have to grind this and then use a strainer. Once that’s done…

Take the two apples and skin them. We don’t want the skins because they kinda ruin the taste. Also, skins are waxed these days to make apples look shinier. We don’t want that. So we discard the skins.

Take a big mixing bowl and add one cup of regular flour,one cup of wheat flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, the tablespoon of cinnamon powder and a quarter of a teaspoon of salt. Make sure you mix this well so that all four ingredients are evenly distributed. 

Next, take the unsalted butter and cut away a generous piece. Then chop it to shards. Ideally you should be using butter which is at room temperature, but we being amateurs, we pulled it right outta the refrigerator and decided to make it work instead of waiting for it to warm up. We’re aiming to get half a cup of unsalted butter. We then have to cream it. Creaming essentially means that you need to use a fork (probably works best) and kneed it till it looks like whipped cream. It needs to be a nice thick substance, rather than lumps of butter we started out with. 

At this point, set the oven at 220 degrees centigrade. The reason we’re doing this is because the oven will have to be preheated for 20 minutes before we put the batter in. It should take us roughly 20 minutes to get it ready from this point.
Then take a cup of sugar and put it in the blender. When it becomes powdery fine, add it to the butter and continue kneading. Make sure it’s mixed well. Ideally you should use a fork when mixing, but if you’re slightly short on patience, feel free to get your hands in there.

Add in an egg, and beat. Then add in a bowl of curd and beat again. At this point, make sure you don't over beat after adding the curd. (If you over mix, the curd will cause the mixture to curdle). So do it quickly.  

Great, now once that’s done, add the mixture into the dry ingredients. Mix again.

Remember, your skinned apples are still lying on the counter. Chop it up into chunks and add that into the batter. Then mix. Your batter is now ready. Go ahead and try it. 

Pull out your baking dish, grease it with butter and line it with flour. Again, this is important simply because you don’t want the pie to stick to the dish when you pull it out of the oven.

Put the batter into the baking dish, spread it out and sprinkle some brown sugar on it. 

If 20 minutes are done, stick the dish into the oven. 

We had to pull it out coz we realized that the oven was not switched on. We just set the temperature and forgot to switch it on. This time, we switched it on and made sure the red light came on. 

After 20 minutes we stuck the dish into the oven again… and prayed. Even our granny joined us. After all, we hoped that we didn’t screw up. 

After 10 minutes of baking, lower the temperature to 220 degrees centigrade and bake for another 5 to 10 minutes. Once done, pull it out.  

We pulled it out and extracted it from the baking dish with much difficulty. We had to turn it over and give it a few whacks so that it would come out. Then we turned it over again.

Now cut it up and serve. We had it with Vanilla ice cream but I’ve been told, it tastes yummmm with custard as well. Trust me, our prayers worked. It was gooooooodddddd… 

_________________________________________________________

Acknowledgements

 - Reva again for baking it just right.

- Aditi for letting us use her kitchen again, and this time, remaining completely calm during the whole process.

- Shanta and Leela for helping us cut and pound when we were not doing it right.

- Dodda for praying.

- I know I should be thanking someone here for the recipe…..humm…oh yes… smittenkitchen.com

- Reva said that I should also credit the photographer as well. I will do so by thanking myself here.

Until next time, STAY HUNGRY AND EXCITED!!!