It's right about this time of year that my blood starts turning to into custard because – oh yeah – it's finally getting cold enough to scoff puddings and pies again! I love pies, but when it comes to custard? Meh, I'm more of a hot, strawberry blancmange kinda girl if I'm being totally honest (I'm an 80s kid through and through, okay?). Sunny, on the other hand, is an absolute super fan who likes to drown his desserts in the stuff and would happily drink it on its own if I let him 😉 When it comes to the dessert itself, he does love a good old apple pie or crumble but would probably admit that at the end of the day they're just a vehicle for the custard, and as for me I get a bit bored baking the same old apple dishes every year. So, I've been on a mission to come up with an apple pie that's so damn good it upstages the custard.
3 Apples of any variety (I used Pink Lady), peeled, cored and thinly sliced into segments.
Boil your apple segments in lemon juice and water until they're just soft enough for a knife to pierce them, then leave to cool.
Set your oven to 170° and grease a 20cm open bottom cake tin. Sprinkle with a little flour and then set aside.
In your mixing bowl, cream together the butter and 125g of the sugar. Stir in the egg.
In a separate bowl sift together most of the dry ingredients; that's the flour, baking powder, ground almonds and 1 tsp of cinnamon. Combine with the wet ingredients.
Stir in the buttermilk to make a light batter.
Pour the batter into your cake tin and smooth over the surface. Arrange the apples on top in a spiral starting about a centimeter away from the edge of the tin. Make sure you overlap them so that when the cake rises in the oven you're not left with any gaps.
Before you pop the cake in the oven sprinkle over the remaining sugar and teaspoon of cinnamon. Bake for 50 minutes and then serve up warm with custard or ice cream. Add some toffee sauce to turn it into a toffee apple cake!
Did you also have a rabbit shaped blancmange at your birthday parties?! I wonder if they were all sold in Cardiff or if my family got it from somewhere else?!
YES! Although my Mum used to put jelly in it, we always had blancmange hot for some strange reason…!
I seriously hated that stuff and mum still insisted on making it. She wouldn't be caught dead serving it now, she even had the audacity to tell me that "tinsel is so 90s" when I was decorating my tree this year!