Lazy Apple Cake

Ingredients

200 g sugar + 100 g for the apples
150 g plain flour
200 g semolina
1 tsp baking powder
1 ½ kg grated apples
1 dl chopped hazel nuts (optional)
80 g unsalted butter
1 tbsp cinnamon

Method

1. Mix apples, sugar, hazel nuts and cinnamon.
2. Mix sugar, flour, semolina and baking powder.
3. Grease a cake tin with butter. Use a springform if possible, then it's easier to serve. A round tin of 20 cm diameter is good.
4. Place a third of the apples in the cake tin, then cover with a third of the flour mix.
5. Continue with the next third of apples and flour mix, and then another layer with the final thirds of apples and flour mix.
6. Cut thin slices of butter and place on top of the last layer of flour mix. In fact, if you have a cheese slicer, this is perfect to get thin slices.
7. Bake in the oven at 200 degrees C or gas mark 6 for about 30 minutes, until the cake surace turns golden brown. If using a springform, put it on a shallow baking sheet with a lip, as it will likely leak.
8. Leave to cool a bit before taking the cake out of the tin, by turning it upside-down. Serve with custard or whipped cream.

The story behind this cake is that when I was a toddler, I'd watched my Mum baking in the kitchen and I'd seen her mix ingredients in a bowl into a dough, that she'd pour out of the bowl onto the work surface, then knead into something. So one day, she'd done this mix and I'd sneaked in, determined to help her. The result of pouring the mix onto the work surface was a kitchen filled with flour dust. I have no memory of this, but I do remember that she'd never let me help her out later on.

Also I've been having a discussion with Lundulph about cooking apples. This is a new concept to me. There are only dessert apples in Sweden, Germany and Bulgaria. In order to settle things, we've decided to make two lots of some sort of apple cake, one with dessert apples, one with cooking apples and see how they taste. Granny Smith apples are defined as both dessert and cooking apples, I think, so it's a way of getting around this. As this is a Bulgarian recipe, I suspect a different variety of apples would be used. So I can only suggest that you experiment.

Update 2021-11-01: In an odd turn of events, my Mum discovered that she's lost her recipe, so searched through her old recipe books and actually found the original, which gives the amounts per weight, so I've updated the above recipe. I'll need to double-check the butter, I'm not sure its enough.

The original recipe calls for icing sugar, but we've always done the cake with granulated sugar, so I suspect it doesn't matter too much, but a dark sugar would probably be better, to add extra richness to it.