Apple, lemon and chocolate cake

The cake in the picture with this post may not be the best-looking thing I’ve put on here, but it just might be one of the tastiest.

It’s the sort of cake I know would hardly register with me if I saw it on a bakery counter. My gaze soon moving to the more cream-laden, highly decorated things around it.  But it would be my loss, I’d be missing out on the wonderful contrast between chunks of sweet apple and shards of bitter chocolate, to say nothing of hints of whisky, lemon and fennel running through the cake. Proof perfect that you shouldn’t always eat with your eyes. It really is about the flavour.

The recipe comes from Honey & Co Baking and is a favourite in this house. Honey & Co are a London based deli and restaurant, specialising in middle eastern foods, their recipes packed with flavours and I highly recommend this and their two other books. All three are on my shelf. I’ve never made it to their London base but have seen the owners/writers, Sarit Packer & Itamar Srulovich, at the Aldeburgh food festival a couple of times. They’re great fun to watch and the food they’ve produced has been mouth-watering.

I baked the cake yesterday, along with a loaf of rye bread, and by the end, the kitchen was infused with a heady mixture of freshly baked bread, cooked apple and a touch of aniseed from the fennel. If any scented candle makers are reading, you have to try this combination.

Many of my recent posts have been about comfort food, and this is another which falls firmly into that category. If lockdown and the general malaise of this time of year weren’t enough, we’ve now had over 24 hours of constant snow and there’s at least another days worth in the forecast. Plenty of time to stare out of the window with a coffee in one hand and a slice of cake in the other.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp whiskey
• zest & juice of a lemon
• 2 apples diced…no need to peel
• 40g strong dark chocolate…I used 85% cocoa chocolate in this
• 2 eggs
• 160g caster sugar
• 130ml vegetable oil
• 150g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 1tsp ground nutmeg
• 1tsp ground fennel seeds..to get the best flavour I recommend toasting them first 
• pinch of salt

Method

• Heat the oven to gas mark 4 and line a 1kg loaf tin.
• Mix the whisky & lemon juice and zest in a bowl. Chop the apples and leave them to soak in the whisky and lemon mix
• Chop the chocolate into shards and put it in the fridge while you prepare the cake
• In a bowl whisk the sugar and eggs until they puff up and go pale.
• Then still using the whisk pour in the oil until it is all incorporated.
• Use a spatula to fold in the flour, baking powder, nutmeg, fennel and salt. Once all combined fold in the apple along with the whisky and lemon juice, then finally the chocolate.
• Pour the batter into the lined tin and bake for 35 minutes. Then turn the tin around and bake for another 15 minutes. As the batter for this cake is very runny I sometimes find these times need to be extended.
• The cake is ready when a knife pressed into it comes out clean.
• Let the cake cool in the tin before you take it out.