What to Do With All Those Apples

A just-sweet-enough cake for dessert or breakfast

I have to preface this post with the warning that I am very much not a baker. It’s not that I don’t like baking; on the rare occasions I do it, I enjoy it. However, my energy seems to naturally orient itself towards the kinetics of cooking — chopping, flipping, liberally salting — rather than the precision of baking. (Perhaps that is simply an excuse for being a mediocre baker.)

But one thing I do bake with relative success is olive oil cake. This — and the occasional half-hearted banana bread — is pretty much all I can do. It’s a dessert particularly well-suited to someone who usually does not make dessert; it’s quite savory, and after all, there’s a reassuringly massive quantity of olive oil to make dinnerheads feel at home.

After picking up a large sum of honeycrisp apples trucked from upstate to the wilds of Union Square, I figured I’d get adventurous and bake a pie, or perhaps finally take a stab at a tarte tatin. But the oil was calling me, and it doesn’t take much convincing to take the road more travelled. I settled on cooking down those apples and throwing them in the trusty olive oil cake batter, along with a fortifying dose of amaro. There was no cinnamon and nutmeg involved; I wanted this to be pure apple, sans warming spice, with just a hint of orange zest to enliven things.

For an amateur like myself, it worked out pretty well, hitting that distinctly Italian note of not-too-sweet and possibly-better-as-breakfast. Are there more impressive apple-based desserts to bake? Probably, but if I can do this while eyeballing the measurements, anybody can.

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Apple Amaro Olive Oil Cake

Ingredients