Home › Frozen Desserts › Apple Cake
Apple Cake
11/½ cakes compressed yeast 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoon sugar 1/4 cup butter 5 apples. 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 3½ cups sifted flour 1/4 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in lukewarm milk; add one and a half cups of flour to make a sponge, and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside in a warm place until lightabout three quarters of an hour. Have sugar and butter well. creamed; add it 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 and sprinkle with sugar. Cut apples in eighths and press into the dough, sharp edge downward; sprinkle with cinnamon ; cover and let rise about one-half hour.
Bake twenty minutes. Keep covered with pan first ten minutes, in order that the apples may be thoroughly cooked.
A yeast-raised apple sheet cake of the German Apfelkuchen type. The original gives no oven temperature and the ingredient list has at least one garbled number, so read the two notes below before starting.
- The yeast quantity"11/½ cakes" is an obvious typesetting mangle of 1½ cakes of compressed yeast. A cake of compressed yeast of the period ran about 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to one modern packet of active dry, so 1½ cakes is about 3½ teaspoons active dry or a scant 3 teaspoons instant.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal in a book that assumed the cook knew her own range. A yeast-raised fruit cake of this thickness wants a moderately hot oven, somewhere around 375F; twenty minutes at that heat is consistent with the stated time.
- The inverted panThis is the hinge of the recipe. Covering the cake with a second pan for the first ten minutes traps steam and cooks the apple wedges through before the dough sets and colours. Uncovered, the apples stay crunchy and the surface browns too early.
- Scalded milkScalding raw milk was standard practice, usually explained as destroying the proteins and enzymes that slacken a dough, and it also dealt with unpasteurised milk. With modern pasteurised milk it is enough to warm it to lukewarm, around 100-110F, which is what the yeast requires.
- ApplesFive apples in eighths for two shallow pans; a firm, tart variety that holds its shape, such as Granny Smith or Braeburn, suits the method better than one that cooks down to purée. The apples are pressed in sharp edge downward, which seats them in the dough as it rises and spreads.
- Pans"Two well-greased, shallow pans" is not specified further; the dough is rolled half an inch thick, so use whatever shallow pans give you that depth without crowding.
- TimingsThe forty-five minute sponge and two-hour bulk rise are as the recipe gives them, and assume a cool kitchen. In a warm modern room both may run faster - judge by doubled volume, not the clock.
- Filed oddlyThis appears under Frozen Desserts, which it plainly is not. The book's loose-leaf format, with punched pages a reader could rearrange, may be how a yeast cake ended up out of section.
Yeast-raised apple cake baked flat in a shallow pan, sugared and cinnamoned on top, is the German and Central European Apfelkuchen that arrived in American kitchens with nineteenth-century immigration and settled comfortably into general household cookbooks. The compressed yeast places it after the spread of commercial fresh cake yeast, which was distributed by refrigerated wagon and became widely available in American cities from the later nineteenth century, making a two-rise dough an ordinary proposition rather than one requiring a homemade sponge or barm. The loose-leaf format of the book, with punched pages a housekeeper could file her own clippings among, is very likely how a yeast cake came to sit with the frozen desserts.