In Which I Bake A Cake

Yes Virginia, it is November. Outside smells like wood smoke, inside smells like chicken stock and apple cake.

I had every intention of working in the garden today. But I had a coffee date at 11:30 (no match trust me) and by the time I had done a little shopping ( 3 lbs. organic chicken wings,  3 lbs of tart apples, a Sunday Times and a blue velvet curtain to switch up my bedroom closet "door" for the season) and hiked up the hill back home, I was ready to nest, not garden.

I went all Smitten Kitchen. From the chicken stock, to the apple cake, I channeled Deb Perelman all the way baby.

Well almost all the way. I don't have a slow cooker but I have a stove and a soup pot so the 5 ingredient stock is cooking very slowly right next to the potatoes I'm boiling for a dinner frittata.

The also 5 ingredient cake is cooling on the counter. When you're a non baker, you use the simplest recipe you can find. You also google spring form pan to see what it looks like. And realize to your delight you have one.

Of course if I really was Deb Perelman, my batter wouldn't have stuck to one side of my pan resulting in me peeling off the sticky crust and popping it in my mouth (yum) leaving a rather uneven looking cake. And now I understand I'm supposed to flip the sucker over, peel off the parchment paper, flip it again and sprinkle with cinnamon. Insert laugh track here. I have visions of it all falling apart when I try this and I will have inadvertently made an apple crumble, in the truest sense of the word.

Why oh why is S-man in the bowels of the Pentagon working when I need him here?

Oh my god, I did it. Kind of. Note to self, if you flip your cake in the dining room while writing a post and watching football, make sure you have your plate at the ready, not in the mud room, so you have to leave cake,upside down, gasping for breath, while you run to get platter.

 

  Minimal damage. 

Very moist cake, bursting with flavor. Ingredients: apples, eggs, sugar, flour and vanilla.

So simple even a child I can make it.

 Now off to make that frittata.

 There's no such thing as a dinner cake is there?