Apples

We have a russet apple tree in our back garden; we chose that variety because we like the apples, also they ripen later in the year so considering how erratic our summers are we thought  waiting until late summer early autumn would give us the best chance for delicious fruit! Maybe we aren’t having enough hot days, but over the last couple of years, although the tree has had plenty of fruit, the apples aren’t very sweet; russets aren’t traditionally cookers, but that’s what I’ve been doing – especially with the windfalls.

I thought I would make an apple cake; a dear friend from the Netherlands gave me a cookery book with old Dutch recipes, so I thought about Dutch apple cake… but maybe it’s not really a Dutch thing because there was no recipe for it in the book. Then I thought about Yorkshire apple cake, having been there recently, and bought a little cookery book, but the recipe in there from Ripon, and eaten during Wilfra Week (St Wilfred’s week)  was more of an apple pie with a cheese topping. Serving cake or sweet pies with cheese is a great Yorkshire tradition, and it should really be a Yorkshire cheese which is offered, such as Wensleydale made more famous by the Wallace and Gromit films.

I turned to my favourite Victorian cook, Eliza Acton and looked at her recipe; the name is Apple Cake or German Tart, and it is quite interesting but not what we would think of as a cake. She makes an enriched pastry, filled with a ‘marmalade’ made from three, yes three, pounds of apples, which to me seems more like an apple curd as it is made with butter and apples boiled together with a lot of sugar until it is ‘smooth and dry’ and cooled to a paste.

So… I’m off to explore my other cookery books just to find a simple cake with apples in… My featured photo by the way is not our apple tree!