Enjoy your next coffee with a slice of this toffee apple cake! A soft and crumbly spiced apple cake with a warm toffee drizzle on top.
Apple season is upon us! During this month a small village in Luxembourg, Steinsel, organises an apple picking festival, which we usually visit as an annual tradition. However, this year due to the circumstances we had to skip it.
This festival was one of the first activities I attended to when I arrived here in Luxembourg and, also, the first outing with my fellow trainees back then. For this reason, this place holds a special place in my heart as it was the start of a great adventure and friendship. It’s also incredibly fun to go around the orchard to choose and pick up the apples with friends. Once settled with our apple picking, we always dive into a traditional Grillwurscht sausage, with some Luxembourgish mustard of course. Downing everything down with some fresh apple juice or cider. At the end, even though we might be full, there is always space for some apple dessert! I tend to go, either for the amazing apple cake or the freshly fried to order apple fritters.
As I was longing for a piece of fresh apple cake, I decided to make one myself this year. I created this crumbly soft apple cake with a luscious toffee syrup for an added sweetness. It’s now one of my favourite cakes which I ended up making already twice since there are apples everywhere.
What’s in the cake
This spiced fall apple cake is made with flour, eggs, baking powder, salt, brown sugar, lemon juice, apple juice, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, butter, walnuts and finally grated apples in the batter. Before baking in the oven, the cake is decorated with thinly sliced apples as they add some texture to cake. Also, they’re really pretty on top.
Best Apples to use
The best apples to use while cooking and baking are gala, bramley, honeycrisp, golden delicious, jonagold, or granny smith. For this cake, I used granny smith apples for the top and gala apples for the inside. I like using a mix of different apples as they can balance each other out.
Toffee sauce
This toffee sauce is the BEST!! Also, it’s vegan! I was supposed to do a normal warm toffee with butter and double cream. However, when I was actually doing the cake I realised that I forgot to buy double cream (why do I always have to forget something?). After an extensive research in my cabinets, I decided to use some coconut cream and brown sugar and thickened everything with cornstarch. It just works so perfectly and with this cake the slight coconut taste is just amazing!! However, you can easily use any toffee/caramel sauce for this cake and it will work just as fine.
Toffee Apple Cake
Ingredients
Apple Cake
- 250 g self raising flour
- 100 g butter
- 3 eggs medium
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 50 ml apple juice
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 70 g brown sugar
- 50 g walnuts chopped
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp ginger
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 apples about 150g (1 grated and 1 sliced thinly)
Toffee sauce
- 250 ml coconut cream
- 100 g coconut sugar
- 1 tbsp cornstarch
Instructions
Apple Cake
- Preheat the oven to 160°C or 320°F. Spray a 20cm cake tin with neutral oil and line with parchment paper. In two separate bowls mix the grated apples and sliced apples with 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice each, and set aside.
- In a mixer with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar until they're smooth and pale. In a bowl, mix together the dry ingredients; flour cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, salt and baking powder.
- Slowly start adding, and alternating, the eggs, apple juice and flour until everything is incorporated. Lastly, add the grated apples and the chopped walnuts and combine.
- Fill the cake tin with the cake mixture and decorate the top of the cake by placing the sliced apples in a circular pattern.
- Bake the cake for about 50 minutes, or until a toothpick or skewer comes out clean once inserted in the middle of the cake.
- Leave to cool in the pan for 5 minutes before transferring the cake to a cooling rack to finish cooling.
Toffee Sauce
- Over medium heat in a small saucepan, place the coconut cream, brown sugar and cornstarch. Stir the mixture continuously until it starts to boil, once you start seeing the bubbles increasing, lower the heat to low. Let it simmer for about 5 minutes and stir frequently so that the sauce doesn’t burn. Once done, the sauce can be used immediately or once cooled. While it cools the sauce will thicken further so don’t worry if you think the sauce it’s too loose. Any leftover sauce can be stored in a glass container in the refrigerator.
- Serve the cake with a drizzle of this toffee sauce while warm and enjoy! Optionally, you can also serve this cake with a dollop of vanilla ice cream.
Notes
- If you don’t manage to find coconut cream, simply use full fat coconut milk. All you have to do is, before opening do not mix the can and scoop out the white top part and leave the coconut water.
- Any other sugar can be used, coconut sugar and brown sugar are ideal as they give extra colour to the sauce.
If you have any questions, feedback or comments on this recipe, please leave a comment below. Please also rate this recipe by double clicking on the stars below. If you did make this recipe, tag @apronandwhisk and hashtag #apronandwhisk, as I’m curious to see what you create!
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If you don’t have self rising flour what can you use instead..thank you
Hi 😊 If you don’t have any self raising flour simply add more baking powder. For this recipe you’ll need about 3 1/2 tsp baking powder extra (in total 4 1/2 tsp). The ratio is 2 tsp baking powder for every 150g flour to make it act as self raising. Hope that this helps! 😊