Easy No-Peel Apple Cake

Happy holidays!  Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, or just the fact that you have a long weekend away from the office, I hope you are enjoying your time off and spending it with family and friends.  Stan and I are in Nashville this weekend, hanging out with my parents, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather and having a little Hanukkah celebration. 

One of the many ways we’ve been celebrating is with cake – sweet, delicious, ridiculously moist, crunchy-topped cake.  Cake filled with so many apples there seems to be more apples than batter.  Cake my family cannot stop eating – despite the fact that 50 percent of us are on a diet and 25 percent of us are not supposed to eat gluten.  Oops… but hey, that must mean it’s good, right?

In addition to being good, this apple cake is easy to make.  I had 10 minutes to spare yesterday before my parents got back from an errand, and I wanted to make something sweet.  In terms of the prep work, I’m not sure what I liked better – the fact that you add all of the ingredient to the mixing bowl at one time (no need to measure your dry and wet ingredients separately) or the fact that you do not have to peel the apples.  Ok, that’s a lie. I don’t like peeling apples.  I love that this recipe specifically calls for unpeeled apples. 

Most of all I love this cake because my family loved it – and that’s the most important thing of all.

 

One Year Ago: Cranberry Sauce and Chipotle Macaroni and Cheese with Bacon

Two Years Ago: Tortellini Soup

Easy No-Peel Apple Cake

Adapted from The Cutting Edge of Ordinary

Ingredients:

For the Cake:

1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

2 eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. baking soda

4 cups apples, diced into ½-inch pieces (about 4 medium apples)

For the Topping:

1/2 cup pecans, chopped

1/4 cup granulated sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 9x13 baking dish.  (I used nonstick cooking spray.)

Combine all of the cake ingredients except the apples in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Stir until just combined.  (You can also use a large bowl and a hand mixer.)

Stir in the apples.  (I used a rubber spatula to do this.)

Spread the batter into the prepared baking dish.

Top with the sugar and pecans.

Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.  (My cake was perfect after 45 minutes.) Cool the cake in the baking dish on a cooling rack.

Serve warm or room temperature.