Saturday's grilled apple cake

A bit of a long blog today (but there are two totally different bakes), so I have split it in two in case you want to read it in parts.

Part 1

The arrival of visitors, even if just for a passing visit on their way to deepest (and based on the weather forecast possibly darkest) Cornwall was a good excuse to spend the morning baking. The alternative was doing chores so there wasn’t really much contest.

That I would be baking a cake of some description was not in question – Sarah and Andrew’s (our visitors) son is a big cake fan and far be it for me to disappoint a toddler. What sort of cake it would be was not clear.

I also wanted to do something savoury for lunch. I had a bit of a browse of my recipes books and cuttings but found nothing suitable. There were plenty of tasty sounding things but I didn’t have the ingredients. Again, a long time has elapsed since we last did a “proper” shop and I was not about to go to the supermarket on a Saturday morning out of choice. So a bit of improvisation would be called for. I decided that I would venture to make some sort of pastry filled bake. It would be a quiche or a flan, the boundaries between which are not clear to me.

I have never made a quiche or a flan before. Therefore I thought it wise to address this first before making the cake. I found a basic sort of recipe in a trusted old cook book and set to work on the pastry. I mixed the flour and butter and then added enough water to bring it together and it resembled pretty much what I thought pastry should resemble. I knew that you’re supposed to chill pastry before cooking but not was not sure whether you were supposed to do this before or after rolling. I went for the chill first option – during which time I relented and did a few chores, mainly to make our house a little less hazardous for the imminent arrival of a toddler.

I removed my ball of pastry from the fridge and began to roll. At which point it all fell apart. I was able to rescue it with my (clean) apron to prevent it from falling on the floor. I toyed with the idea of adding a bit more water but have a vague notion that pastry is ruined by too much water. So opted instead to add an egg yolk. I think I did this because my mum once told me that I could add an egg yolk to my granny’s cheese straw recipe and I saw this pastry as not too different, plus egg is sticky so should hold it all together. I managed to reform my ball.

I couldn’t be bothered to chill it again now so rolled my pastry out. I was amused that without any effort on my part it assumed the form of the Iberian Peninsula.

I sort of managed to line my quiche / flan tin, this required quite a bit of patching up and I decided to rechill it for a while to facilitate pastry bonding. 

So back to the cake. I was tempted to go for marmalade cake but had made this for Sarah and Andrew on our most recent visit to them so thought I should try something different. Chocolate was another option but I’d enjoyed chocolate cake at work (that my friend had brought in for her birthday) for 2 days in a row preceding this. So it was back to browsing through my recipes. I finally settled on an apple and cinnamon cake, the recipe for which I’d picked up at a property conservation charity's tea-room. The recipe stated that I should use 2 apples. But I had 4 small ones that were going a bit wrinkly so would need peeling and thought it could probably take all those. It also called for 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. But I love cinnamon and the volume of the rest of the recipe seemed sufficient that it could take a bigger slug than that (I probably added 2-3 teaspoons). It would also need apple juice. But I only had apple and pear juice and failed to see how this would do any harm. I mixed all up as directed and it seemed ok, kind of like a muffin mixture rather than a sponge mixture but that was to be expected as it uses oil rather than butter.

Still, it was rather sloppy so I put my spring form cake tin on top of another tray just in case of the event of leakage before pouring the mixture into it.

Whilst looking through my recipes I had been intrigued by some of them that were “crumble” cakes. I decided to augment this apple and cinnamon cake with a crumble topping. For this I decided to use the 3 parts flour, 2 parts sugar, 1 part fat recipe that my mum gave me. On this occasion I used the formula where:

one part = 25g

because I had 75g of plain flour to use up (this is a useful use of algebra if ever there was one). I sprinkled the crumble mixture over the cake and put it into the oven to bake.

Part 2

I had blind-baked the quiche / flan case whilst getting on with the cake which was a risky strategy because I had adulterated the pastry recipe so wasn’t sure how long it would have to cook for. Fortunately it seemed to come out ok. Only ok, because there were some small cracks in it where I had done the patching up. Clearly chilling does not facilitate the bonding of pastry but there was no going back now. For the filling I was planning on using leek, mushroom and tomato. I began by chopping 3 leeks and sautéing them to soften. I would normally use olive oil but since this was in the bedroom (Matt, my husband, has been anointing my ear) I used normal vegetable oil. While they were softening (the leeks, not my ear) I prepared my mushrooms but it soon became evident that the leeks were not going to reduce in volume by very much and the volume of the case would be insufficient to accommodate mushrooms as well. In actual fact 2 leeks would have been quite sufficient. We would have the mushrooms raw in our salad.

The time was up for the cake so I took it out of the oven but the skewer test suggested that it wasn’t cooked so I but it back in and got on with the flan / quiche filling. The basic recipe I had required:

• 2 eggs; I also added the egg white I had left over from rescuing my pastry so save it from going to waste
• 75ml of milk which I could do
• 150ml of single cream; I substituted 150g of reduced fat crème fraiche (although this is one of those recipes where it seems pointless to use anything reduced fat but this is what we had left over from our Friday night fajitas)
• No cheese; this would not do so I added about 100g of grated mature cheese (I am not a fan of things that taste eggy and I thought that the addition of plenty of cheese would minimise this risk)
• Salt and pepper; I omitted the salt since I thought the cheese would provide enough saltiness.

Once I’d whisked that all up I skewer tested the cake again. Now it was cooked through, but the crumble on top wasn’t looking very crumbly. Rather than risk over-cooking the cake I decided that this could be remedied by sticking it under the grill for a bit. Unfortunately I got so engrossed with filling my flan / quiche case and decorating it with cherry tomatoes

that I forgot about the cake until the smell of burning sugar hit my nostrils. Based on the amount of smoke that was coming from cake I think that we may only have been moments away from a full on fire (which reminds me that I must get a domestic fire extinguisher).

So now whilst the quiche / flan cooked I attempted to rescue the cake by scraping the burnt bits from the top. I managed to make it look ok but it wouldn’t be until later whether the taste of burning had infused the rest of the cake.

 

In my panicked state following the burning cake I had forgotten to take note of when I put the quiche / flan in the oven. Fortunately I was not so panicked that I didn’t keep a reasonably good eye on it and got away with just a minor bit of cheese crisping (which I love anyway).

Even if these two bakes ended up tasting dreadful I would take a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that I was able to

extract both of them from their tins and onto cake stands without any disintegration. And there wasn’t any leakage through the cracks in the pastry either.

A certain toddler (and probably the rest of us for that matter) didn’t want to wait until after lunch to try the cake. But we managed. We had lunch in the garden in the intermittent sunshine. The quiche / flan went down very well, with all the grown-ups having seconds. I was particularly pleased because it didn’t taste at all eggy.

We let our flan / quiche (and bread and cheese and salad and crisps) go down before progressing to the cake. It didn’t taste burnt at all. In fact it tasted rather good. 24 hours later it’s nearly all gone – there’s just one piece left; and that’s for Matt as a reward when he’s successfully finished the current phase of his DIY. (We finished the quiche / flan off for tea last night!)