This terrific mildly spiced loaf cake, loaded with dried fruits and toasted nuts, gets its special taste and texture from a very thick homemade apple purée. Because it keeps really well at room temperature, this loaf is something you’ll want to have on hand for the holidays to eat/serve just about anytime—at breakfast, brunch, as a pick-me-up with afternoon tea or coffee, or even—yes!—as a midnight snack.
You’ll actually be making two recipes, the apple purée, which can be made way ahead and refrigerated for a week or two, and the cake itself. For the purée you can use just about any fall crop apple. When I first came up with this recipe I used firm-textured apples such as Braeburn, Granny Smith, and Jonamacs. But this fall our Macintosh tree blessed us with a gorgeous crop of big, juicy and crisp fruit, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll see if they’ll cook down and thicken enough to work in the recipe. And they did! So any fall apple variety will work.
My advice is to make the purée when you’ve got a couple of hours to spare for some meditative cooking. It takes awhile to prep the 5 pounds of apples—peeling, quartering, coring, and cutting into chunks. And once that’s done, the apples will need about an hour to cook down slowly to about 4 cups of heavenly thickness. The purée, flavored with vanilla, Applejack (or cider), cinnamon, and butter, is so thick and smooth it will stand at attention.
The firm-textured cake takes only minutes to make, and it bakes up in less than 90 minutes, perfuming your kitchen with the aroma of apples and cinnamon. You’ll probably want to slice into it as soon as it’s cool. But don’t. Instead, wrap the completely cooled loaf in plastic wrap and let it stand at room temperature overnight. The texture and flavor need that extra time to be at their best. Oh, and when you do eat this cake, please serve portions with a generous spreading of cream cheese.
Here's what the baked loaf looks like.
