Apple streusel bars

At a first glance, you would think that these bars have some sort of chocolate filling. After looking at pictures from lovintheoven, I just had to give these bars a try. They turned out delicious - not too sweet, cinnamon-y and lovely texture.

I actually like the whole rubbing the butter into the dry ingredients using my fingers. It's not as tiring as creaming butter and sugar and the weather here is cold enough unlike Malaysia where you'll end up with a melted and sticky mixture. That reminds me, I really need to start making pies and tarts.

Mine looks different from lovintheoven and ourbestbites because I used dark brown sugar for the filling, I didn't peel the apples and I sliced them into chunks instead of thin slices. I didn't bother with the icing but they would've looked more presentable with it.
I made mine in a 9 inch square tin just because I prefer a thicker crust. Plus, the 9x13 inch baking tin was under a lot of other bowls etc and it seemed like more effort to take out. I know I can be lazy at times but it does actually seem completely justifiable at the time.

Apple streusel bars

makes 16 mini squares or one 9 inch tin

Pastry
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
8 oz butter
1 egg, beaten

Apple filling
1/2 cup white sugar (I used dark brown sugar)
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon (I used more cinnamon but I lost count - either 3 or 4 tsp)
4 cups sliced apples

1. To prepare crust, mix flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a medium bowl. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or two knives until you have pea-sized crumbles (I rubbed the butter into the dry ingredients with my fingers). Gently mix in beaten egg.
2. Spray a 9x13 baking dish or a 9 inch tin with non-stick cooking spray. Gently pat about 2/3 of the crumb mixture onto the bottom of the dish. Preheat oven to 180 C and set aside.
3. To prepare apple filling, combine flour, sugar, and cinnamon. Toss with apples and spread apples out on prepared crust. Sprinkle reserved crust mixture over apples evenly and bake in preheated oven for 40 minutes (mine took 50 minutes). When finished, allow to cool completely. Cut into bars and serve.

Apple custard tea cakes

I was a bit disappointed with this recipe. Thought it required more apples. I still have 2 more sour apples on top of the 6 apples I got today. The recipe says 1 large apple. In my opinion, the size of my sour apple is small so technically I should've used at least 1 and a half apples. I still ended up having to eat about a quarter of the 1 apple that I used.

I can never fill up cupcakes with just the right amount of batter. It's always either too much or too little. 1 of them kinda leaked out; more of a semi leak cause it didn't overflow from all sides but just a corner and the other 5 sorta have the pointy shape in the centre which I'm not really a fan of. I like cupcakes that are slightly rounded. Well, from the pictures, they don't really look pointy cause it's hidden by the sliced apples but from the back, there's an obvious bump where the pointy bit was trying to form (refer to muffin at the top and the one on its left and right in the picture below. It's not that obvious cause of the angle but if you were to take a side profile, there's an obvious pointy bit!).
This recipe is from the Australian Women's Weekly-the complete book of cupcakes, cheesecakes and cookies, page 85. The bf got it for me before we left Wales for London and I pretty much spent the entire journey going back and forth between recipes and napping.

The apple custard tea cakes is basically batter, custard and batter. No pictures of the making process cause I basically chatting on the phone whilst making the batter and by the time I got off, I had already filled up the cupcake cases with batter.

The cakes were yummy when they just came out of the oven but Y said that it had gone a bit solid by the time she got back which was a couple of hours later. I'll definately try making this again but not with this recipe. I quite like the idea of a secret filling hiding inside.

Apple custard tea cakes
makes 6 muffins

for custard
1 Tbsp custard powder
1 Tbsp caster sugar
1/2 cup milk
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

for batter
90g butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup self raising flour
1/4 cup custard powder
2 Tbsp milk
1 unpeeled apple, cored, sliced finely

30g melted butter
1 Tbsp caster sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1. Make custard according to instructions and leave to cool.
2. Preheat oven to 180 C and line muffin pan.
3. Beat butter, vanilla extract, sugar, eggs, flour, custard powder and milk until ingredients are combined. Increase speed to medium and beat until mixture is changed to a paler colour.
4. Divide half the mixture among cases. Top with a heaped Tbsp of custard and spread remaining batter to cover custard. Top with apple slices, pressing slightly into the batter.
5. Bake for 30 minutes.
6. Brush hot cakes with melted butter and sprinkle with combined sugar and cinnamon.

Note:

For the batter, I creamed the butter and sugar, incorporated the eggs and sifted in the flour but that's only cause I didn't read step 3. I also added an extra 1/2 tsp cinnamon to the batter.

Apple cake

Welcome to my first post.

This is my second time using this apple cake recipe from smitten kitchen. I have a really bad habit of not reading recipes before I begin. I usually only make sure that I have all the ingredients before beginning. Though I do assume that there's always sufficient flour or sugar in the house only to realise that there's none left when I've actually started the recipe and are halfway through the steps of adding the ingredients. Oh, and I usually jumble up the steps too. My bad.

The first time I made the cake, I didn't read the part about adding the batter, apples, batter then apples. I just did batter and apples. I thought it was odd that I had too much apples at the top of the cake and that 50% of the apples fell off after the cake was removed from its tin. Mind you, this was 2 years ago. I did keep the recipe as the cake was a big hit at the party I made it for.

Last week, I bought a bag of apples (about 10 of them) for a pound and I thought to myself, money well spent. I had one and it was one of the sour-est bunch of apples I had ever eaten! Ok, I might be exaggerating a tiny bit but I wasn't going to torture myself by eating another one.

I whipped out smitten kitchen's recipe, halved the recipe and voila. The smell of cinnamon in the air whilst the cake is baking, yum yum. Ooh, and the cake is moist on its own and goes perfectly with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream.


Sorry for the lack of pictures as I forgot to whip out the camera whilst making it.

I made a few changes to the recipe. I used 4 apples though when I realised that there should be 2 apple layers and I reduced the amount of sugar.


Apple cake recipe

4 apples
2 Tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp lemon juice

1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 cup milk
zest of an orange
1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 170 C.
2. Grease a 7 inch bundt tin and line with parchment paper.
3. Remove apple cores and cut into chunks. Toss with brown sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice.
4. Sift together dry ingredients.
5. Whisk together wet ingredients.
6. Mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients.
7. Pour and spread half the batter into the tin, half the apples, the remaining half of batter and then apples.
8. Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.