Conjuring Apple Cake
An old memory, plus a new recipe for Apple and Anise Loaf Cake, and a detour into the Hudson Valley to look at contemporary Italian art
Welcome to Buona Domenica, a weekly newsletter of inspired Italian home cooking. I’m Domenica Marchetti, journalist, cooking instructor, occasional tour guide, and author of eight cookbooks on Italian cuisine.
This week’s recipe for Apple Anise Loaf Cake is free to all subscribers. I do my best to keep as much content as possible available to everyone, but this newsletter is a labor of love. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which gives you access to all recipes, participation in giveaways, and discounts on cooking classes. Plus it will make you feel good. Grazie!
One Saturday morning, my sister, Maria, and I woke up to find our father had baked an apple cake for breakfast. This was highly irregular. As far as we knew, our father, Frank, had never baked a thing in his life. What’s more, he generally frowned on sweets for breakfast. There was no Hostess in our house.
On winter mornings, Dad would sometimes prepare for us half a grapefruit with a prune pressed into the center where the segments met. This might be followed by cream of wheat (cooked in skim milk), or sometimes oatmeal (cooked in water) which we made edible by pouring lots of maple syrup on top. (By contrast, when our mom made oatmeal, she used milk and half-and-half and added cinnamon and loads of brown sugar.) Dad’s own breakfast of choice was cereal—Familia muesli sprinkled with wheat germ—with skim milk and half a banana.
Our mother, Gabriella, did the vast majority of the cooking and baking in our house—many of her recipes or ones inspired by her have been published in my books over the years. But Dad did have his signature dishes: beef tenderloin, which he made for Christmas Day or dinner parties, roasting the meat on a sheet pan to perfectly rare doneness; garlic bread, and for this he allowed himself to be generous with butter; and burgers or T-bone steaks on the grill. For grilling he used a small cast iron hibachi for years and years until it finally rusted out and he had to upgrade to a Weber kettle grill.
But apple cake? Frank was a chemist and also a person who loved apples, and so now, thinking back on this anomalous occurrence, I can see how the idea of baking an apple cake might have appealed to him. But on that long ago morning it was a confounding, if entirely delightful, surprise. I remember no details about the cake itself—were the apples in chunks or shredded? was it baked in a square pan or round? whose recipe was it? But I do remember sitting at the kitchen table oohing and ahhing over it with my sister. Was it the cake that we loved or the surprise? Both in equal measure. We heaped praise on our dad and his creation, much to the annoyance of our mother, who couldn’t fathom why we were gushing over one basic cake when she turned out superlative meals every night.
For weeks, months, possibly years, we continued to bring it up, more often than not to get on Mom’s nerves. For some reason, Dad never made the cake again, or any other baked good. Maybe he decided he didn’t like baking after all, or maybe he, too, got fed up with our antics. The other day I texted my sister about “that time Dad made an apple cake” and she didn’t remember any of it, not the cake, or our glee or the fuss we made, which saddened me a tiny bit. But that’s memory for you. What looms large in one person’s head takes up no space in another’s. Also, I’ve reached the age where it is entirely reasonable to question if I made the whole thing up.
I did not. What’s more, I’m sure that my longstanding love for apple cake can be traced back to that distant Saturday morning. For years I’ve collected recipes, typically during trips to Italy, where apple cakes are set out on breakfast buffets at hotels and agrituirsmi. Years ago, I posted a recipe on my website for this Sambuca-spiked apple cake from my friend Marta, who runs a B&B in Sulmona, Abruzzo. Last year, I wrote about an apple cake that I had at Hotel Mediterraneo, in Santa Margherita, Liguria. Another favorite was this Venetian apple cake from my friend Paola’s book Adriatico.
Recently, while paging through Irina Georgescu’s wonderful book TAVA: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond, I came across her recipe for Apple and Caraway Loaf Cake (Chec cu mere si chimen). It’s one of more than a dozen recipes I’ve bookmarked to make. Coffee Cream Puffs is another, Walnut Cake with Sour Chantilly Cream and Drunken Cherries yet another. I could go on.
Irina’s apple cake is a simple loaf in which an apple is shredded on a box grater rather than chopped or cut into pieces so that the pulp becomes part of the crumb as the cake bakes. “All over Romania, a chec has so many variations that I could easily write a whole chapter on it,” she writes in the headnote. “Many people have their own favorite recipe, they bake it plain or marbled with cocoa powder, or dot it with fruit and serve it glazed or dusted with icing (confectioners' sugar).”
Between Irina’s words and the accompanying photo of the cake, with its deep brown top and golden crumb flecked with caraway seeds, I knew I had found this year’s winner. I’ve adapted the recipe slightly, adding a splash of vanilla extract and substituting aniseed for caraway seeds to give the cake an Italian accent. The recipe is below.
MORE APPLE CAKE LOVE
As I was writing this newsletter, a smattering of apple cake posts from fellow Substack writers appeared in my inbox, as if to confirm my belief that we apple cake lovers are not a small bunch and we are in good company. Among them:
of Edible Living, shared a recipe for Apple Olive Oil Cake from ’s book Cucina Povera. posted a recipe for a classic Maine apple cake laced with nuts and apple brandy (it’s towards the end of the post but rather than scroll down, do yourself a favor and read the whole thing).Then there’s this Bolzano Apple Cake from
, who writes the Farm Share Newsletter here on Substack. The recipe, from a Seattle chef who trained in Alto Adige, was originally published in the NYT.Also, I’ve had my eye on this Sourdough Apple Fritter Cake from
at A Sourdough Story since she published it a few weeks ago.READERS: Have you got a favorite apple cake recipe? Tell us about it in the comments.
RECIPE: Apple and Anise Loaf Cake
There is nothing cozier than a slice of apple cake to go with your morning coffee or afternoon tea. This recipe comes from Irina Georgescu’s wonderful book Tava: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond. In the headnote to her recipe, Irina writes that “Many people have their own favorite recipe, they bake it plain or marbled with cocoa powder, or dot it with fruit and serve it glazed or dusted with icing (confectioners’) sugar.”
In her original version, called “chec cu mere si chimen,” Irina uses caraway seeds, which I love. But I wanted to put an Italian spin on the cake, so I substituted anise seeds. Either way, you will love this simple cake with its beautifully browned top and tender golden crumb.
Makes one (8 1/2 x 4 in) cake
INGREDIENTS
Sunflower oil or butter for the pan
1 tablespoon anise seeds
4 ounces (115 g/1 stick) unsalted butter, at cool room temperature
3/4 cup (150 g) golden granulated sugar (or regular granulated sugar)
2 medium eggs
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups (150 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 medium-large sweet-tart apple, such as Crimson Crisp, Gold Rush, or Honey Crisp, shredded on the large holes of a box grater (about 5 ounces/150 g pulp)
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Preheat the oven to 350° F (180° C). Grease an 8 1/2- by 4-inch (20- x 10-cm) loaf pan and line with parchment (I skipped the parchment). Toast the anise seeds by putting them in a small skillet and heating them on medium just until they turn a shade darker and are fragrant. Stir or shake the skillet as you go so that the seeds toast evenly. Set aside to cool.
2. Using a hand mixer or a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, cream the butter with the sugar until pale in color and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, incorporating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. Whisk together the flour and baking powder and stir this into the batter. Fold in the shredded apple and toasted anise seeds.
3. Scrape the batter into the loaf pan (it will only fill 1/2 to 2/3 of the pan) and bake for about 40 minutes on the lower shelf of the oven, until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from the oven and transfer to a cooling rack for 20 minutes. Gently invert the pan to remove the cake; reinvert and let the cake cool to room temperature before serving.
PICTURE ITALIAN ART: Cold Spring, NY
On Friday, as my husband and I were driving up to Vermont, we took a little detour in the Hudson Valley to visit Magazzino, a museum of contemporary Italian art. The museum, set in the bucolic hills of upstate New York, began as the private collection of Nancy Olnick, daughter of the late New York real estate magnate Robert Olnick, and her Sardinian husband, Giorgio Spanu. It is now a nonprofit entity and research center with a goal of promoting contemporary Italian art in the U.S.
“Arte Povera” is one of Magazzino’s permanent exhibitions; it features 12 artists associated with the avant-garde movement that emerged in 1960s Italy. Here is an excerpt of the museum’s description of Mimesi, the piece pictured in the photo above:
“Artist Giulio Paolini has long been interested in vision as a way to know the world. Mimesi (Mimesis) belongs to a series in which Paolini made plaster casts of iconic classical sculptures. In the series, the artist plays with classicism in an avant-garde way. Mimesi is composed of two plaster casts of the Greek messenger god Hermes from the classical marble sculpture, Hermes with the Infant Dionysus (350-330 BCE)…By making two casts of the same sculpture, the artist sets up a dialogue between original and reproduction.”
In addition to art, there are spectacular grounds and a newly opened café that serves really good panini. Magazzino is also home to four Sardinian donkeys, so…worth a visit just to see these cutie pies.
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Alla prossima,
Domenica
No Hostess in our house but, mom would sneak in the occasional box of Drake’s Funny Bones 😂
We have a great recipe from baker extraordinaire Abby Dodge up on cookthevineyard.com right now. Cinnamon Apple Skillet Cake - so yummy! https://mvmagazine.com/news/2023/09/26/cinnamon-apple-skillet-cake