We went to the orchard today! Well, not “the” orchard — there are plenty of those around here — but to the one that we’ve now gone to twice, thus giving it default status in my brain. You know how it is. It was a lovely warm fall day, and after some picking and some playing on the playground and hay bales, we came home with a good 15 lbs or so of apples: mostly Empire, some Mutsu.

And what do we do with that many apples? We make cake. I tweaked the recipe I used a fair bit, so here is my variation of “Roman Apple Cake” from an old copy of the More-with-Less Cookbook.

Autumn Apple Cake

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup plus 2 Tbsp flour
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp cloves
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup milk
• 3/4 tsp vanilla
• 3 large apples, peeled and chopped

Mix dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl, lightly beat oil, egg, milk, and vanilla. Add wet ingredients to dry, and stir until well combined. Fold in chopped apples.

Scrape batter into a greased 9″ cake pan. Bake at 350F for 35 minutes or until a knife inserted in the centre comes out clean. Serve warm with applesauce or ice cream.

Enjoy!