"Jewish" Apple Cake

Jewish Apple Cake is a popular sweet cake with a dense batter filled with chunks of apple. It's not actually a Jewish recipe; I'm not really sure where it originally came from or why it came to be known as Jewish. The usual recipe does have one advantage for Jewish cooking, though: it uses no dairy ingredients, which means that it can be eaten with a meat meal. Kosher dietary laws prohibit eating meat and dairy together (“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21), and most cake recipes have dairy ingredients so they can't be eaten after a meat dinner. But Jewish Apple Cake is made without milk or butter, a perfect desert after a meat meal! It uses apple juice and vegetable oil where most cakes use milk and butter. It's also vegetarian, but it's not vegan because it is made with eggs.


I thought I would share this recipe today because apples are a traditional Jewish food for Rosh Hashanah and the following weeks leading up to Sukkot. It is a popular custom to dip apples in honey during this time, to express our wish for a sweet new year. This recipe has no honey, but it has plenty of sweetness!

I use buckwheat flour for this recipe. I have a lot of family and friends with Celiac disease, which prevents them from eating gluten, so I've gotten in the habit of making alternative recipes with gluten-free flours. But I like the flavor of buckwheat with apple so much that I always make the recipe this way! You can use white or wheat flour if you prefer, but really, it's yummy this way!

Ingredients

The Apples

• 4 to 6 tart apples (Granny Smith, Macintosh, something like that)
• 1/3 cup sugar (there is more sugar used below! Be sure you have enough!)
• 1 tbsp cinnamon

The Batter

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup apple juice or apple cider
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 3 cups buckwheat flour (you may need a little less if you are using white or wheat flour)
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 eggs

You will want a 10-inch tube pan or a bundt cake pan to cook this in.

The most time-consuming part of this recipe is peeling and cutting the apples, so you may want to start pre-heating the oven to 350 degrees after that is finished and prepare the batter and put it together while the oven is heating.

Preparing the Apples

• Put the cinnamon and sugar in a 1 gallon Ziploc or similar bag and shake it up to mix
• Peel the apples, slice and core them, and cut each slice into four to six pieces. Note: Most of the recipes I see for this call for six apples but I usually use just four and it's plenty, Use as many as you want.
• Put the apple pieces into the bag one apple at a time and shake it up to cover the pieces with the cinnamon sugar.

Preparing the Batter

• Start preheating the oven to 350 at this point if you haven't started already
• Mix the sugar, oil, juice and vanilla until well blended
• Add two cups of the flour, then baking powder and salt, then the last cup of flour, mixing all the time
• Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each egg. This will start to get very smooth and liquid, but that's OK!

Putting it all together

• Put a thin layer of the batter at the bottom of the greased tube or bundt pan
• Cover that with a few handfuls of the apples
• Alternate between the batter and the apples, trying to run out at about the same time
• If there is liquid in your bag from the apples, just pour it over the top

Bake at 350 degrees for 90 minutes.

Take it out and let it cool a little bit. Run your rubber spatula around the edges before you try to take it out, to loosen it, then turn it over. Then turn it back over because it will look and serve best that way, with the smooth side on the bottom and the rough side on the top.

L'shanah Tovah!