Monday, January 27, 2014

Easy apple and walnut sponge cake

We still have mountains of apples in cool storage and although they are beginning to look a little wrinkled, they taste sweet and tangy. Rather than letting them deteriorate we will use them in cakes, peeled for eating and for dehydrating as snack to use for when we are out walking.



This recipe for an apple and walnut sponge cake is one of the easiest cake recipes I have ever come across and never fails. The basic recipe can be adapted to use fruit, nuts, flavoured yogurt and chocolate.


Easy apple and walnut sponge cake

This recipe is used widely across Spain and in known as bizcocho de yogur.

4 medium eggs
250 g plain flour
180g sugar (we reduce this to 130g when using sweet fruit)
1 natural yogurt (or flavoured for a twist)
1 yogurt container of vegetable oil
15g baking powder

Walnut pieces and sliced apple

Beat all the liquids together, add flour, sugar and baking powder, mix well. Add walnut pieces.
Spoon half into greased or lined baking tin, add sliced apple, spoon over remainder of mixture, top with sliced apple. Bake at 160 Celsius for 45 mins. Cool on rack.


We are still using last year's walnuts but not for much longer as it was a depressingly poor season for walnuts due to Spring storms damaging young shoots and buds.


Meanwhile back in the kitchen, whilst the oven is on we made a batch of rye and mixed seed bread. Once baked, this will be frozen and used over the coming couple of weeks.
   

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:14 pm

    How funny - apple, walnut & ginger cake is what I made the other day, and put in my blog post. Yours looks nice. More apples went into some bread, with spelt, rye and fennel seeds. I think I might go and eat a piece now.

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    Replies
    1. You are making me jealous now Veronica.....ginger sounds great and so does the bread - is it a normal bread recipe then add everything else?

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    2. Anonymous5:16 pm

      Yes, though I say so myself, the ginger (plus a bit of allspice, which I think is good with ginger) in the cake made it very nice. The bread is a pretty basic recipe from a Riverford Farm cookbook, using a bit of rye flour, mixture of white and wholemeal, plus yeast, oil and honey. However in this case I think the spelt was a mistake as a substitution as the combination of this and the apple and nuts made the whole thing slightly crumbly and very slightly too moist, though tasty and perfectly servicable. We often put fennel seeds in bread, so often in fact that some friends think that is what all our bread tastes of.

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