Apple Crumble Cake

This cake is pretty special. Three layers in total; cake, fruit, then crumble. What's not to like? It's a pudding and a cake all in one. Soft lovely sponge, sweet sticky apple with tangy orange zest and then crunchy nutty golden crumble. This is going to be my cake of choice to make for quite a while. The recipe is from Beyond Nose to Tail from the clever people at St. John who write that you can also use rhubarb, apricots, nectarines, gooseberries, pears and ginger, plums or damsons. Plenty of scope to roll this one out a few times then...

Start with the fruit layer. First peel the apples, I used 3 Cox eating apples. Core them and cut them into cubes about 1-2cm squares. Put them in a bowl and add 50g of caster sugar, 50g of demerara sugar and the zest of an orange. Mix it all up and leave while you move onto the next layer.

Next for the cake. Cream 125g of unsalted butter together with 125g of caster sugar until it is light and fluffy. I loath this bit, it is hard work, much harder work than I think baking should be... Then gradually add 3 lightly beaten large eggs. Just add them a tiny bit at a time to avoid it curdling, I think mine did curdle slightly, maybe why my cake layer wasn't so light and fluffy at the end perhaps... but it still tasted damn good. When all the eggs are beaten in fold in 160g of sifted self raising flour, followed by 50ml of full fat milk. Put the cake mix to one side.

Now the crumble. Sift 125g of plain flour into a bowl and add 95g of unsalted butter cut into small cubes. Rub them together with your fingers until they are like large bread crumbs. Add 60g of demerara sugar, 30g ground almond, 30g of flaked almonds and a pinch of salt and mix it all up.

So now you have the three layers ready to assemble... Butter a cake tin and heat the oven to 180°C. Add the cake mix to the base of the tin and spread it out evenly, it seemed like I didn’t have that much cake mixture but it turned out fine. Then spread the apple mix on top of the cake mix, I poured over the sweet sugary orangey juices that had formed also. Finally cover everything with a thick layer of nutty crumble mix and bake in the oven for 1½ hours. If the top starts to get too brown cover it with tin foil for the rest of its baking time. You can serve it warm with cream or it is just as good cold. Cake? Pudding? Who knows, who cares, it's delicious...