Apple Cake
1 1/2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 3 1/2 cups sifted flour 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 5 apples MAKING good Apple Cake is an art. This recipe will assure you Apple Cake in which the rich, tender apple-flavor mingles with blended sugar and cinnamon to produce a most tempting goody.
Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in lukewarm milk, add one and one-half cups flour to make a sponge and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside in warm place until light--about three-quarters of an hour. Have sugar and butter well creamed, add to sponge. Then add eggs well beaten, rest of flour or enough to make a soft dough, and salt. Knead lightly. Place in well-greased bowl. Cover and set aside to rise--about two hours. Roll half an inch thick. Place in two well-greased, shallow pans. Brush with butter, sprinkle with sugar. Cut apples in eighths and press into dough, sharp edge downward. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Cover and let rise about one-half hour. Bake twenty minutes. Keep covered with pan for first ten minutes, in order that the apples may be thoroughly cooked.
This is a yeast-raised sheet cake, not a creamed one. It behaves like enriched bread dough the whole way through and only looks like cake once the apples go on.
- One and a half cakes of yeastA cake of compressed yeast is about two and a quarter teaspoons of modern active dry yeast, or one 7g sachet, so this recipe wants roughly three and a half teaspoons. A single sachet will do the job in a warm kitchen; the sponge and the dough will each take about an hour longer, which does the flavour no harm.
- Scalded milkScalding was ordinary practice when milk could not be relied on to be pasteurized. With milk off a supermarket shelf, warm it to blood heat and carry on. If it does get hot, let it cool properly — milk hot to the touch will kill the yeast outright.
- Five apples, two pansThat is very nearly a solid surface of fruit. A firm variety that holds its shape is wanted here, because the wedges have to stand up rather than collapse into the dough. Cutting into eighths and setting them sharp edge down is what makes them stand.
- The pan on topInverting a second pan over the cake for the first ten minutes is not a flourish. It traps steam so the apples soften in the twenty minutes the dough needs, and without it the fruit comes out underdone. Foil tented loosely over the pan does the same work.
- Oven heat and the unmeasured toppingNo temperature is given anywhere in the booklet. Twenty minutes for a half-inch sheet of enriched dough points at a hot oven, around 400°F (200°C). The butter, sugar and cinnamon brushed and scattered over the top are left unmeasured as well; two tablespoons of melted butter and a third of a cup of sugar across two pans is a reasonable reading.
A cake raised with yeast, baked flat in a shallow pan with fruit pressed down into its surface, is a central European form rather than an English or an American one — the same arrangement as a German Blechkuchen built on a sheet. The firm whose name is on this booklet grew out of that world: Charles Fleischmann was a Hungarian immigrant who settled in Cincinnati and began producing compressed yeast for American bakers, and a sweet yeast-raised cake was an everyday thing where he came from. By the time this page was printed the American cake had largely gone over to baking powder, which is part of why it opens by insisting that good apple cake is an art. The recipe is also an argument: a reason to keep a cake of yeast in the house for something other than bread.