ITALIAN APPLE CAKE

Nonna’s rustic and comforting apple cake recipe

This is a simple recipe you can make all in one bowl, with just 15 minutes of hands-on time…and while in the oven, its fragrant smell will take you back to some sweet childhood memories – guaranteed!

Made with fresh, crisp and slightly tart apples with a firm texture, this apple cake is light, fluffy, moist, and not too sweet, making it really hard not to have seconds, thirds…and so on 😄

  ‘Torta di mele’, as it is traditionally called, is a classic rustic Italian cake [like also ‘Torta Caprese’] – a speciality of Italian grandmas, who all have their own recipe and will not tell you their secret ingredient.  

Well we are here to reveal it to you – the secret ingredient is LOVE 💛

A little history

Apple cake is a very popular recipe worldwide, thanks to millennia of apple cultivation in Asia and Europe, and their widespread introduction and propagation throughout the Americas during the colonisation.

The original recipe can be traced all the way back to Medieval times, when cooking apples was a way to preserve the harvest past its natural shelf life. With time, other ingredients were added to the cooked apples, like spices, sugar and flour, until they slowly became proper cake recipes.

Almost every country has its own version of apple cake or pie, and indeed Italy has an apple cake variation in each region, especially in the northern areas where apples are grown in spades. Some example are the apple strudel, the Bolzano apple cake and the ‘Tourta de Saint Grat’.

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INGREDIENTS👇🏻

• 1kg | 35.27oz Fiji or Golden Delicious apples

• 2 eggs

• 2 lemons

• 200g | 07.1oz sugar

• 200g | 07.1oz plain flour

• 100g | 03.5oz unsalted butter

• 200ml | 7.04fl oz whole milk

• 16g | 00.6oz baking yeast powder • 2g | 00.1oz cinnamon • sea salt • icing sugar for decoration

The recipe step by step

1. Grate the zest of one lemon and squeeze the juice of two
   

2. Melt the butter and set aside to cool down
   

3. Sieve the plain flour and the yeast powder and mix them together
   

4. Peel and slice the apples, then bathe them in the lemon juice topped up with water to cover
   

5. Incorporate 2 eggs with half of the sugar and a pinch of sea salt, then whisk them thoroughly. Add the rest of the sugar and whisk again until the mix looks velvety and fluffier
   

6. Add cool melted butter, lemon zest and cinnamon powder and whisk once more
   

7. Keep whisking to incorporate little by little the flour-yeast mix, and then the milk still little by little and on a lower whisking power
   

8. Fold in the well-drained apple slices, making sure to keep some aside for decoration
   

9. Butter the baking tray, dust it with flour and pour in the mixture
   

10. Decorate with apple slices on the top and bake for 50 mins at 180°C | 356°F
    

11. Let it cool down and dust with icing sugar…then enjoy! 😋