Cake #25: Paula Deen's Grandgirl's Fresh Apple Cake from Georgia

I skipped ahead to make this cake for an office party at my house, and I have to say, I did this right*. Before the party, I made the batter, which wasn't too hard. The recipe calls for 3 cups of apples, which ended up being 3 apples. They were either gala or pink lady apples, bought from New Pi in Iowa City, and were starting to get soft, so not great for eating but perfect for cake making!

Once the batter was made, I let it sit for several hours before baking it, which was fine. The reason for that is, you have to be home and paying attention to it for like 3 hours when it's actually baking.

This cake has apple chunks, coconut and pecans in it. And it calls for 1 1/2 cups of vegetable oil. I like to follow the recipe exactly the 1st time I make it, or at least I like to think that I like to do that, especially in books like All Cakes Considered where the book is teaching you different methods as you go... but I could NOT bring myself to make a APPLE cake with OIL instead of APPLESAUCE. (Yes, those capital letters are my loud voice). So I just went for it and put in 1 1/2 cups of unsweetened applesauce instead of oil and it turned out awesome.

It bakes for 1 1/2 hours so I set the timer for 1:15, and when it went off, I set it for :15 again and I started the sauce: 1 stick of butter (aren't you glad the cake doesn't also have 1 1/2 cups of oil to go with that butter?), 1/2 cup of buttermilk, 1 cup of sugar and a little baking soda. I melted all of this in a small sauce pan. (In hind sight, I realized the recipe actually says you'll need a MEDIUM sauce pan, and I somehow missed that when I wasn't reading that part of the recipe, so for next time that word MEDIUM is now circled.) So... you bring this melted stuff to a boil for 1 minute then remove from the heat. I didn't get that far because in less than 30 seconds of boiling it was overflowing in my SMALL sauce pan. Lesson learned. The good news is that the stove top got cleaned after the making of this cake sauce.

So then I took the "non-business end" of a wooden spoon and poked 20 holes in the cake the moment it came out of the oven, and poured the melted sauce in it. Slowly. Still, it wasn't really soaking anything up, so I poked some more holes in the cake and poured even slower. You can see in the photo above how unattractive this part was. Someone asked why my cake had rabies.

Then it sits for AN HOUR slowly soaking in the buttery sauce, and after an hour (or a little more), I flipped it onto a plate and nothing happened, so we used a knife along the edge to loosen it and then flip it over.

 It popped right out and looked great! (The unattractive side is now the bottom.)

This is a very moist cake, just like the book says it should be, and the apple chunks, coconut and pecans really add to the flavor. The coconut is not a dominate flavor at all. This is an easy cake to make and it tastes great, and leftovers can be eaten for breakfast with a cup of coffee. The only thing is that you have to be there for a few hours during the baking process. So, it's a good cake to make when you have people over!
Oh, the thing I did right?
*I waited to bake it until we had a crowd of people in the house, because that 1 1/2 hours the cake is in the oven makes the house smell amazing. Like cinnamon and apples.