Talk-A-Vino

Don’t worry, this will not be a story about apple wine. At the minimum, it will be about food and wine. So the weather was beautiful, and the apple-picking trip (almost an annual tradition in the fall) was inevitable, especially considering the free weekend day. Our favorite place to pick apples is Lyman Orchards in Middlefield, Connecticut. This place never disappoints – apples are good and abundant, and getting them off the trees is a lot of fun. Once you have a lot of apples, what do you do? No, not wine. And for me – not an apple pie either. I don’t really like liquid pies, so my personal preference is an apple cake. How do you make an apple cake? Actually, quite easy. Here is the recipe:

4 apples (Granny Smith is the best as they are usually sour enough to stand against sweet dough)

3 eggs

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of flour

Cinnamon ( by the taste).

Butter to grease the pan

Bread crumbs

Core and peel the apples, and slice them thin. Make the dough: blend eggs first, then add sugar, and then flour. Make sure you end up with liquid and consistent dough. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 425F.

Grease pan with butter and cover with bread crumbs. Bread crumbs should cover the bottom and walls of the pan. Remove excess bread crumbs. Your pan should look like this:

Then, put sliced apples into the pan and sprinkle them with cinnamon (the amount of cinnamon goes by the taste):

The dough goes on top:

And then the pan goes in the oven:

Bake it first for 15 minutes at 425F, then reduce the heat to 375F and continue for another 45 minutes or until the top is brown enough (you can check readiness with a wooden toothpick). DO NOT OPEN the oven until the end – you have to let the cake rise. At the end of the process, you end up with this:

And this is the look inside:

Yep  – Yummy!

Do you think this post is about food only? No, of course not. Yes, you can have this cake with ice cream, coffee, and/or tea. But this blog is about wine, so how about it? I’m glad to report that Bartenura Malvasia Salento IGT 2009 from Italy, a sweet, lightly fizzed wine worked quite well with that apple cake, complementing each other.

Here we are – tasty and very simple cake ( takes about an hour from start to finish) and simple easy wine – all together equal to a great and enjoyable evening.

Cheers!

P.S. By the way, what would you pair the apple cake with?