Spiced Apple Cake

Now, I know it's Thursday and to still be cooking things from my "Things to cook this weekend" list from last weekend is incredibly slack, but bear with me, I have awful tendonitis at the moment and am struggling to type, let alone cook.. so to try and bake today was a bit of an adventure.

I always make cakes by hand, not least because no one has ever seen fit to give me a Kitchen Aid mixer, just because they love me and feel they should, but also because I love to bake and I love to bake how I was taught by my mother. So I do it all by hand. And I thoroughly enjoy it too. However, this does mean that this week (and any week my wrists and arms are bad) baking is out of the question. Today, I have had the day off for a hospital appointment, so while I was working from home this afternoon decided to have a bash at my cake.

It's the Waitrose recipe I linked to the other day. The only alterations I make are to soak the sultanas in either tea or alcohol, today it was in honeyed rum; this is something I nearly always do when I cook with sultanas now, I first started doing it with Nigella's banana bread, and whenever I make barm brack (exact recipe provenance unknown; my mother wrote it down for me before I went to uni) soak the fruit in cold tea. It does just make a wonderful difference to the squishiness of the fruit, and you don't get any strong pervading alocoholic or tanniny taste, just a sweetness. I also add nutmeg to this cake as well as the cinammon. I just decided to try it that way last time I made it, and really liked the combination of flavours. I'm thinking for the winter of adding a tiny bit of something like allspice, but I need to investigate that further. I must say I do wish that you could buy spices locally to me from a market where you can smell them, because that way when I'm baking or making up a curry paste I could follow my nose and not just be limited to a recipe.

Anyway, the alterations to the recipe were made for my arms sake, so I melted the butter in the microwave and then used the whisking attachment on my food processor (this wins the prize for the least used attachment I think) to beat the butter and sugar up together. I mixed the flour and spices in by hand, as that and the rest was fairly straightforward. An hour and 10 minutes later... Spiced Apple Cake... which is currently being sampled with tea, before I sally forth into the dark, cold and wet.

Oooh I'm thinking blogging may be a good excuse for a cake plate...