- Apple Wonder Cake

Dear Fans of Hounds Who Cook,

We just made an amazing discovery. We thought that a ne'er-do-well had slipped into the home and stolen not all of our recipes, but just the dessert section from our Best of All Possible Recipes box. We have said very little of this while the crime was under investigation. It turns out, though, that it was merely a filing error (no doubt by the cat). All of the desserts were filed under the next category "Eggs and Dairy" which is a silly category to separate out since eggs and dairy are in everything and we rarely think of them as a category of their own. So the crime is solved, there was no household break-in, and our recipes are safe. We are considering purchasing an actual safe now that we have our own blog. It's just a matter of time before someone tries to thieve our premium recipes.

So, with all of our Desserts in hand, how, how do we choose? We dogs will choose the Raw Apple Cake that we dub Susan's Apple Wonder Cake, as it is wonderful. (That is what other persons call our girl, Me, but she always calls herself "Me" to us.)

In the spirit of fairness and the crispness of fall,we will allow the cat his moment in the kitchen too with apple something. See what he dreams up in the next post.

Susan's Apple Wonder Cake
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup sour milk (or buttermilk, or plain yogurt)
2-1/4 cups whole wheat flour
stevia equivalent for 1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons soda
2-1/2 cups chopped apples

Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Butter and flour a 13x9-inch pan. (No need to preheat oven since it will bake a good long 35 minutes.)

Cream sugar and butter til fluffy. Beat in eggs. Sift together flour, stevia, salt, cinnamon, and soda. Mix flour and sour milk alternately into butter mixture. (This means: mix 1/3 of the flour mixture into the fluffy butter mixture. Mix half of the sour milk into the butter mixture. Mix half of the remaining flour into the butter mixture. Mix in the rest of the sour milk. Finish by mixing in the rest of the flour.) Fold in apples.

Spread into prepared pan.

Toss together the topping ingredients and sprinkle nicely over the batter. Bake at 350F (or 325F for a glass pan like ours) for 35-40 minutes until a toothpick poked into the center comes out clean.

Tips from Guthrie: To make this even fat-freer, replace 1/4 cup of the butter with 1/4 cup of cooked date paste (which you make by simmering chopped dates with a little bit of water until they are soft and stir into a slightly lumpy paste). Then call it Apple Date Cake or some will wonder.

Tips from Elias: To give these away because of how many apples you have and how very many apple goodies will be made in the near future, bake it up in mini loaf pans. Then you have a cake that serves 2-4 people and you can give one to each of your elder neighbors who have small appetites. For the diabetic neighbor who always brings you garden produce, leave off the sugary topping, sprinkle with cinnamon and nuts, and let him know it's Low Sugar (because there is still some in the cake). We haven't yet perfected retaining the baked good texture when cooking with only stevia, so we use part sugar and mostly stevia for the sweetness and feel we have found a good middle ground.