Sod everything, and eat cake!
Today has been awful, so I am not going to dwell on Coronavirus and its bloody horrific ramifications that stretch way, way beyond the virus itself.
Instead, I am going to share the delicious recipe for the Somerset Apple Cider Cake I baked over the weekend. It’s so easy, and is scrumptiously moist and tasty. If eating cake is one of the few simple pleasures we have right now, then I advocate baking and eating as much as possible!
This recipe is in our much-used copy of ‘The Great British Book of Baking’ , a compilation of recipes from the BBC series, ‘The Great British Bake Off’.
I was wandering aimlessly around the kitchen looking for something, anything, to cook and noticed we had some apples in the fruit bowl, so…
Somerset Apple Cider Cake
Ingredients
175g softened unsalted butter
175g soft brown sugar (I always measure out slightly less than the stated 175g)
3 medium eggs, beaten
250g Self-raising flour, well sifted
100ml cider or milk (we used milk, as we sadly didn’t have a bottle of cider lurking in the larder)
5 crisp apples (Pink Lady or Gala), peeled. cored and finely chopped. You want around 500g of prepared apples. I squeeze a little lemon juice over the chopped apples, to prevent them from turning brown, and sprinkle them with ground cinnamon
1/2 - 1 tsp of ground cinnamon.
Method
Lightly grease and line a 23 cm springform cake tin with parchment.
Cream together the butter and sugar until it becomes light and fluffy and then gradually beat in the eggs.
Fold in the flour and apple chunks, alternating between flour and apples and add the milk or cider gradually to keep the mixture moist.
Pour into the cake tin and sprinkle to top with some brown sugar.
Place in a pre-heated oven (160 degrees fan) and bake for around 1 hour. Test it with a skewer after an hour and the skewer should come out clean once the cake is cooked.
One lovely piece of news today was that our chums over at Toma and Coe included Casa Higueras in their list of '7 of The Best Rural Retreats and Country Hotels in Andalucia’, and we are both honoured and rather humbled to be rubbing cheeks with the likes of Finca Buenvino, Almohalla 51, and Cortijo del Marqués.
We can’t wait to welcome guests back to our beautiful corner of Spain and share good food, a glass or two of wine and the splendours of the countryside in which we live.
