Italian apple cake

Apple cake is the most comforting cake ever invented. The sweetness of apples paired with the soft sponge and a pinch of cinnamon feels like a warm hug on a cold day. Here is my precious family recipe for a homemade cake associated to dear childhood memories.

I often make apple cake as it’s unbeatable. So easy to make and pleasing everyone.

This cake together with crostata is the cake of my childhood, ever so present on Sundays. My mum is an amazing baker and we were always spoiled with the best cakes. Cake for breakfast is how I have been raised. Yes, I had the best childhood.

In my first years of elementary school, they used to bring huge trays of this cake in the classroom as morning snack for children. I could smell the cake from far away in the school corridor. I rationed each bite of the small square of sponge covered with golden apples. It was pure bliss.

I think apple cake was always served on a Wednesday and I still have positive vibes towards this weekday despite no one gifting me apple cake anymore…being an adult is tough!

This is a bit morbid, but apple cake is probably what I would choose for my last meal. This is how delicious it is.

Alice, my sister in law, is always so supportive of my blog and she gifted me her apple cake’s recipe. I feel so honoured and it’s such a pleasure to share it with you too.

I devoured the recipe on paper dreaming of the ingredients and the final result. This recipe was exactly like my mum’s. It brought back so many childhood’s memoires of mixing milk with butter, stirring eggs and sugars and impatiently starring at the oven mesmerised by the rising of the cake and the apple’s dome on top on a Sunday morning.

This recipe is so special and I’m so grateful that Alice has gifted it to me.

The story behind her recipe is heart-warming. She found this recipe on a children’s magazine and she tried it with her family. The cake was so insanely good that they did it again, again, and again…till they moved house and missed the precious recipe.

They tried to replicate it, but the results were never the same. They even wrote to the magazine to find that old recipe, but that issue was impossible to find.

Twenty or more years later, Alice’s mum is helping the grandma tidying up the house when she finds her old recipe book. The recipe is there written up in elegant calligraphy.

The cake is back!

Alice told that the moral of the story is sharing recipes with others is always the smart move.

And this is one of the reasons why she is such a special person.

I hope you’ll try her recipe and share it with your friends and family as well, so it will never go missing again.

P.S. Try also the mouth-watering green beans potato gratin from the region where Alice is from or an alternative to this apple cake made with yoghurt and wholemeal flour…the very first recipe I shared on the blog dedicated to my mum.