Sandra's German Apple Cake

Submitted by XanderBby

"My mother sent me this unusual recipe back in the 70's. I was baking rolls in a health food restaurant at the time. The restaurant wanted me to come up with a dessert for the menu, so I made my mother's recipe using wholewheat flour, turbinado sugar and organic walnuts*. It was an enormous success! You should note there is no liquid in this recipe. The moisture that binds the ingredients comes from the eggs, oil and fresh apple slices. A pretty good electric mixer and/or strong arm is required to incorporate all the flour no matter what kind of flour you use. The result is more like a stiff dough than any cake batter I've ever seen. I continue to make this cake with wholewheat flour and turbinado sugar because I like the result. You, of course, may use any flour and sugar you want. *Nostalgia Note: In 1974, organic walnuts came from a tree in their original packaging called a shell. To use the nut, the shell had to be broken with something hard called a nut cracker and then the nutmeat was picked out; repeat until the amount of nutmeats equal what the recipe calls for. Today, walnuts come in a bag and if there are any shells involved you can lodge a complaint."

 

• Ready In: 1hr 45mins
• Ingredients: 14
• Serves: 16

ingredients

• Cake

• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup oil (I use peanut oil)
• 2 cups sugar (I use turbinado sugar)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1⁄2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups flour (I use wholewheat)
• 4 cups peeled cored and sliced baking apples (I use Granny Smith)
• 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

• Frosting

• 8 ounces cream cheese
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3 cups powdered sugar

directions

1. Cake: Beat the eggs until light.
2. Add and beat after each ingredient: oil, sugar, vanilla, baking soda, cinnamon, salt.
3. Add the flour in 1/2 cup increments. It will be stiff.
4. Fold in the walnuts.
5. Fold in the apple slices.
6. Pat the dough into an oblong cake pan that's been oiled and dusted with flour.
7. Bake at 350°F for 45 to 60 minutes (or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean).
8. Frosting: Combine the cream cheese, butter, vanilla and powdered sugar. Whip until creamy. Pour over the cooled cake.

Reviews

[AngelaE79]

So good!

 

[MommaEllen]

Made this for Fall PAC 08 and it was great! I made 1/2 the recipe and put it in an 8x8 pan greased with recipe#78579. We ate it before I could make the frosting too. Thank you for sharing this recipe, I really got a laugh from your nostalgia note, we used to have to pick up walnuts from our yard and my dad would run them over with the truck because we had so many, it would take too long to do it by hand. That was really "organically" processing!

 

[Rinshinomori]

I started adding ingredients one by one as directed and midway through realized that there is no measurement for walnuts. I went ahead and added 1 C chopped walnuts anyway. Also, no pan size is shown and I baked my cake with 8 1/2 inch round pan. This may have been a mistake since it took about 1 hour and 30 minutes at 350F to finish baking. Perhaps with a larger pan it would have baked in 60 minutes. My oven is relatively new and I don't like it much for baking. With this new oven my baking results have been inconsistent compared to my old oven. I also reduced the amount of sugar in the frosting - I'm not much of a fan of sweet food and plan to skip the frosting altogether next time. The cake itself is very moist, flavorful, not too sweet, and wonderful. Thank you Xanderbby for posting this recipe.