Apple Spice Cake

Happy New Year everyone! Our new year's weekend was quiet and uneventful but that's fine with me, lots of R&R. Now you would think with my very uneventful holiday schedule, I would bake and bake and bake. I didn't. After baking Christmas cookies and cupcakes, I really haven't been baking any desserts until this passed weekend.

Our friend gave us a gift basket for Christmas and there were some apples in the basket hence this Apple Spice Cake(recipe from The Joy of Cooking cookbook). It's very moist and delicious . If you like your cake a little spicy, add another pinch of spices to the recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup chopped apples

1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Dry Ingredients

1 1/2 cup flour

1 cup packed brown sugar (light or dark)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon salt

I added a dash of ground ginger too

Wet Ingredients

1 cup buttermilk **Note: I didn't have any buttermilk, so I used 1/4 cup sour cream, mixed with apple cider to make 1 cup

1/2 cup oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons brandy(optional)

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8X8 cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. I only have a 9" round cake pan so I used that.

2) Peel, core and chop apples and mix that with chopped nuts.

3) Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Using your fingers, break up any brown sugar clumps into small pieces.

4) In a different medium bowl, mix all the wet ingredients together.

5) Pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients bowl, stir and mix well. Stir in apples and nuts.

6) Pour into baking pan and bake for 40-45 minutes or until toothpick insert in the middle of cake comes out clean. Mine took only 35min because of the bigger cakepan. Cool.

The cake is very delicious without any frosting or glaze. But if you would like, you could serve it with vanilla ice cream or some kind of glaze.

Enjoy!