Apples ♥ Cake

Apple pie is my favrouite, but I also love apple cake. This one reminds me of my Grandma Ehman, who made amazing desserts with the apples on our farm. I can't use those apples without thinking of her. So when my brother gave me a bag of farm apples, I made an old-fashioned apfel kuchen.

Apfel Kuchen
For the cake:
1 cup soft butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 3/4 cup flour
2 lbs apples, peeled and sliced

Cream butter and sugar well. Beat in eggs. Stir in vanilla, salt, baking powder and flour. Remove 2/3 cup and reserve for the topping. Spread remaining batter into a greased 9 x 12 inch pan. Cover with sliced apples.

For the topping:
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup cake batter
2/3 cup flour

Sprinkle apples evenly with the cinnamon and sugar. Mix reserved cake batter with flour until crumbly. Spread over apples. Bake at 350F for 40-45 minutes, until the top is lightly browned and the apples are soft.

Falling for Zucchini Chocolate Cake

When my husband and I got married we had one prenuptial agreement, at his insistence: that I would never plant more than six zucchini at a time.

Talk about tough love. Zucchini is my favourite summer vegetable, for a number of reasons. It grows quickly, it’s lush and attractive, the flowers are big and sunny, and it produces a ton of edible food. Well, perhaps not literally a ton, though it may seem so at times...

Zucchini is incredibly versatile in the kitchen, whether the size of a baby finger or the size of a small canoe, whether in a soup, salad, main course or dessert. Best of all, zucchini flowers are edible, too, and what better way to curb the natural fecundity of a zucchini plant than to nip it in the bud.

In my first garden, I planted twelve zucchini. I had grand plans. I filled the flowers with a mix of herbs, bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, rolled them gently in batter and fried them until crispy and gold. When the zucchini were small, I sliced them into pasta primavera or a pot of minestrone soup. When they were as wide as my wrist, I chopped them into ratatouille or grilled them sliced with olive oil and rosemary.

When they reached the girth of my grandmother's rolling pin, I grated them for vegetable lasagna and zucchini chocolate cake. When I couldn't keep up, I stacked the most plump and matronly zucchini like cordwood waiting for winter. And that’s when John came into the picture.

“What’s with all the zucchini?” he asked.
“Do you have something against zucchini?”
“No.”
“Good,” I said. “You’re having it for supper.”

Cooking for two had the positive effect of doubling my zucchini consumption, but it seemed to make no dent whatsoever in the quantity of the raw material. The zucchini kept pace, as if sensing the drain on resources required a corresponding increase in supply.

There’s a saying in rural parts that the only time you really need to lock your car is during zucchini season. John, however, had a slightly different take on this old adage. He suggested I box the zucchini, add a big red bow and put them in my car unlocked.

As winter settled in, the last of the zucchini began to shrivel and turn yellow in my basement. I had to concede that, perhaps, too much of a good thing is not necessarily a good thing. “I’ve decided to take your zucchini pledge,” I announced, “and to prove my commitment, I’m going to toss the last of these zucchini into the compost pile.”
He glanced at the bucket of yellow zucchini. “They’re rotting,” he said.

“No," I insisted, "just a bit soft." I poked one to prove the flesh was still firm enough for the side of the grater. I made one final zucchini chocolate cake and, in a soft December snow, committed the last of the zucchini to the compost pile. True to my word, I reduced my zucchini patch to six and then to three, and miraculously, I've always had enough for one last zucchini chocolate cake as the snow flies.

I often make this cake in two smaller pans and freeze one for another day. In fact, it's often better on the second day, if you can resist it warm from the oven!

Zucchini Chocolate Cake
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cardamom
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup soft butter
1/2 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
3 cups grated zucchini
Handful of mini chocolate chips

Sift the flours, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt and cardamom into bowl. In another bowl, beat sugar, butter, oil and vanilla until light and creamy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each one.

Add the dry ingredients in three parts, alternating with the buttermilk. Stir in the grated zucchini. Pour batter into pan that has been greased and floured. Sprinkle on chocolate chips.

Bake at 325F for 40-50 minutes, until a knife inserted in centre of cake comes out clean.

Still more zucchini? Make chocolate zucchini muffins or zucchini oatmeal cookies!

(This article first appeared in Grainews.)

Apple Nostalgia in Berlin

In Berlin, I left the hotel room early one morning in search of coffee and apples. Anything with apples.

Wandering the neighbourhood, I found a sunny little bakery on a leafy street near the Brandenburg Gate. It had a tiny sidewalk patio with four tables and a plethora of potted plants. Best of all, a sign on the sidewalk said the bakery specialized in fruit kuchen.

Sure enough, there on the glass countertop were two large round fruit cakes, one plum and the other apple. But don't imagine the kind of fruit cake your grandmother made at Christmas time. They were what we here on the prairies might call "coffee cake" with a cake base, a layer of fruit and a crumble topping. In German, the apple version is called apfelstreuselkuchen. It was delicious, or lecker.

Ever since I was a child, I've loved anything with apples. We had two kinds of apple trees on our farm: a couple of big old crabs and a "pie" tree with large yellow apples, the variety of which no one recalled. We children were allowed to climb the crab apple trees and eat as many as we liked. But we were forbidden to climb the "pie" tree or eat any of its apples without permission. They were seriously earmarked for baking.

When my mother came to the farm as a young bride, she knew very little about cooking. Her mother (my grandmother) was a fabulous cook but she failed to pass on this knowledge to my mom. So my mom learned to cook from her mother-in-law. My Grandma Ehman was not a fancy cook but a good farm cook – hearty wholesome meals with produce from her own gardens, rich in cream and butter, from simple recipes that reflected her prairie roots and German heritage.

This included apple kuchen, applesauce cookies and apple pie. Her apple jelly was fantastic on toast, with pork chops and sandwiched in the centre of jam jams. I'm quite sure I was weaned on her applesauce. I have loved anything with apples ever since.

In the early pioneer days, apples were a rare treat. Dried apples were available in country stores, but fresh apples arrived by rail from Ontario. In 1914, pioneer Julie Feilberg, whose family homesteaded at Nokomis, Sask., recorded that a barrel of apples cost $4.25. She bought them as a special treat with Christmas money sent by her grandfather in Denmark.

Many farmers planted apple trees on the home quarter and, by the 1920s, some had opened their orchards for u-pick excursions. This coincided with the spread of automobiles and apple picking became a pleasant family outing.

Then came the legendary winter of 1942, which was so harsh that most of the apple trees on the northern prairies perished in the cold. Work began in earnest to breed new varieties of apples better suited to the prairie climate, based on experiments already underway at orchards such as those at the Seager Wheeler farm at Rosthern, Sask., and the Morden Experimental Farm at Morden, Man.

Thanks to their passion for apples, I was able to climb a big old crab apple tree in my youth and fall in love with my grandma's hand-picked apple kuchen.

I was thinking of my grandma that day in Berlin when a little bird landed on my table, brazenly eyeing my cake. I put a crumb on the far corner of the table and we enjoyed our apfelstreuselkuchen together in the morning sunshine.

Apple Kuchen
For the cake:
1 cup soft butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 3/4 cup flour
2 lbs apples, peeled and sliced

Cream butter and sugar well. Beat in eggs. Stir in vanilla, salt, baking powder and flour. Remove 2/3 cup and reserve for the topping. Press remaining dough into a greased 9 x 12 inch pan. Cover with sliced apples.

For the topping:
1 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
2/3 cup cake dough
2/3 cup flour

Sprinkle apples evenly with sugar and cinnamon. Mix reserved cake dough with flour until crumbly. Spread over apples. Bake at 350F for 40-45 minutes, until the top is lightly browned and the apples are soft.

(This article first appeared in Grainews)