Apple Cake from The Traveler’s Lunchbox

My take on a very appealing apple cake recipe.

About 20 minutes after this recipe showed up on The Traveler’s Lunchbox I received an email from my mom asking me if I’d seen the apple cake recipe yet.  Plans were immediately made — my dad’s birthday was coming up and, as it turned out, both my parents and my aunt and uncle would be passing through Portland in the afternoon of the birthday.  My mom orchestrated a gathering in my apartment involving everyone and an apple cake that I was to provide.

I was more than willing to bake a cake.  Usually I make extravagant dishes for no special occasion and ultimately feel guilty that I really did eat crème brûlée for breakfast.  A birthday is a socially acceptable, guilt-free time to make a cake.  Also, my dad always appreciates a good cake.

The very specific instructions to omit cinnamon made me somewhat dubious about this recipe.  Compliantly and against every instinct that was screaming for me to throw some in (I most recently added cinnamon to a jar of pasta sauce), I kept my paws off the cinnamon.  I had to settle for a 9-inch springform pan instead of a tart pan, but I otherwise followed the recipe exactly as found on The Traveler’s Lunchbox.  (That’s right — the recipe was so good I’m linking to it twice.)

I served it with homemade whipped cream and Stumptown coffee…and, okay, I cheated a little.  I happened to have some goat-milk caramel sauce more commonly known as cajeta in my refrigerator, and I happened to have made the caramel with a cinnamon stick in it.  So I served the cake with cinnamon caramel sauce.  I got my way.  And it was another excellent recipe from The Traveler’s Lunchbox, a blog I feel so strongly about that I felt the need to include link number three.  And in case anyone was wondering, the cake was pretty wonderful toasted for breakfast too.  Almost as good a breakfast as crème brûlée.