Spiced Apple and Almond Cake with Vanilla Cream Cheese Icing

At the start of this month, with kicking off the Cook Like a Star - Masterchef blog hop, I was so excited and had bookmarked several of the recipes going around the net. I sat immersed in my bookmarked pages, leafing through the recipes, wanting to make everything in a hurry. But the flu got the better of me. And I had to take a break, albeit a forced one mind you, from all the "bakelogging" for almost 10 days.

So now to finish off what we have started, I had high expectations from myself and I wanted to bake something chocolaty, something indulgent, something spectacularly Masterchef like Peter Gilmore's Eight textured Cake (which BTW Amrita had successfully executed. Check out her post here) or Zumbo's V8 but having just recovered from the racking cough and bouts of high fever I finally decided on something simple, something achievable, something realistic, something fruity. I decided to go with an apple dessert, it is Fall after all!!

I had bookmarked the recipe for Spiced Apple and Walnut Cake from Alana Lowes' blog ages ago ( I used almonds in mine as I ran out of walnuts) and this time I knew that this is the perfect cake for concluding our Masterchef blog hop as it represents in essence how comforting home baking could be.

With simple non-exotic ingredients and no-fuss method of making it, this cake is the perfect example of old-school baking and by finishing it off with  a creamy savoury icing, Alana has given it a modern twist. A perfect end to our Masterchef journey.The only changes I made to the recipe were reducing the amount of baking powder and baking soda in it. As we are using self raising flour here, I reduced the felt there is no need to use such high amount of other added chemical leaveners in the cake. I understand we have to add the soda as we are adding fresh fruit to the batter but next time I would love to get rid of that extra baking powder. The cake did rise beautifully even with my reduced level of baking powder and soda.

Alana was one of my favourite contestants (apart from Kate) in the Masterchef Australia season 3. And her recipe delivered exactly what it  had promised..a richly dense and moist cake with creamy delicious icing....absolutely scrumptious!

Spiced Apple and Almond Cake with Vanilla Cream Cheese Icing

Recipe adapted from here
Ingredients:

480gm self raising flour
450gm caster sugar
1½tsp baking powder (I used only 1/2  teaspoon baking powder)
¾tsp bi carb soda (I used 1/4 teaspoon soda)
2tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp salt
4 apples
2 tbsp lemon juice
180gm unsalted butter, melted
3 eggs, lightly whisked
175ml milk
Zest of 1 lemon
200gm roasted walnuts, roughly chopped
ground cinnamon, extra for dusting

Vanilla Cream Cheese Icing:

500gm unsalted butter, softened
500gm cream cheese, softened
2tsp vanilla bean paste
300gm icing sugar
2tbsp lemon juice

Method:

Preheat oven to 170˚C. Grease and line with grease proof paper a 24cm spring form cake tin
for the cake, sift all dry ingredients into a bowl.
Grate the apples into a bowl and add the lemon juice. strain through a sieve and squeeze out excess liquid from apples.  Add to dry ingredients along with butter, eggs, milk, zest and walnuts.  Lightly stir to fully combine, don’t over mix.
Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake for 35-40mins or until a cake skewer comes out clean.
Cool cake in the tin for 5 mins before transferring the cake to a cooling rack to cool completely before icing.
For the icing, beat the butter, cream cheese and vanilla until combined, sift in the icing sugar and add the lemon juice, continue beating until light and fluffy.  Refrigerate for 5-10 mins if icing mixture is too soft to work with.
Once the cake is cooled completely, slice in half widthways.  Spread the bottom half with half the vanilla cream cheese icing and replace the top half.  Spread the top with the remaining vanilla cream cheese icing and dust with ground cinnamon.

Enjoy!!

I m linking this post to the blog-hop event Cook Like a Star, organised by Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids, Baby Sumo of Eat Your Heart Out and me, Anuja of Simple Baking. You can also join us in this event by simply cooking or baking any recipe (from the contestants, judges or even sponsors)  from any MasterChef website (any countries) or cookbook and blog-hop with us for the whole month of September 2012. For more details, check here.

                                                

Here are my other blogger friends who have joined us in this blog-hop. Please visit their blogs to watch more of their 5 star recipes. 

To blog hop with us simply copy and paste this HTML code into your blog post where you want the blog hop list to appear. Make sure you are in HTML mode when you paste the code. get the InLinkz code The rules are fairly simple, 1) Your post must be a current post. 2) Please mention Cook Like a Star in your post and 3) Link back to Zoe, Baby Sumo or Anuja.

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