July marks the beginning of the apple season here. The brightly striped Gravensteins are the first to ripen. And when they do, we spend weeks making homemade applesauce and apple butter.
As our freezer is now packed with applesauce, and there’s more to come, I thought I would experiment with a recipe in the newly published, practical cookbook Kitchen Sense by Mitchell Davis.
The applesauce spice cake came out as good as promised – super moist and spicy. Although the recipe is billed as a “cake”, it is similar to banana, zucchini and pumpkin breads; it would make a great muffin as well.
Applesauce Spice Cake Recipe
PrintThis cake is also great topped with Cream Cheese Frosting!
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
- 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup sugar
- 3 large eggs
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 cup applesauce
- 1/4 cup plain yogurt diluted a bit with milk, or 1/4 cup of buttermilk
- 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts
- 1/2 cup raisins
Method
1 Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter and flour an 8-in square baking pan, set aside.
2 Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Set aside.
3 In an electric mixer, beat butter until light, add sugar and beat until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating to incorporate after each addition. Add the vanilla and the applesauce and beat until smooth.
4 Mix in half of the dry ingredients. Just before they are blended, add the thinned yogurt (or buttermilk). Then mix in the rest of the dry ingredients and the nuts and raisins, until completely incorporated. Do not over-mix.
5 Pour out the batter into your prepared cake pan. Place in the middle rack of the 375°F oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, until done. The cake should spring back to the touch, and a toothpick or thin skewer should come out clean after being inserted in various spots in the middle of the cake. Remove the cake from the oven. Let cool for 15 minutes. Then invert to cool completely on a rack.
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Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.
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i made it by the recipe and it was a hit at my church fellowship!
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Yum! I’ve been trying different applesauce cake recipes, trying to get the taste of my grandma’s cake that she would make us every Christmas. I made this tonight, only using just a half cup of brown sugar and baking in a 9”×13” pan at 350° for 20 min. (Small oven, cooks quickly.) While this isn’t exactly like grandma’s, I enjoy it quite a lot! Excellent by itself or with buttercream frosting!
Another delicious recipe! Had to bake it for 50 minutes since the middle was very wet after 30 minutes. Also, I didn’t have all the individual spices on hand, so I used pumpkin pie spice blend which worked just as well. Elise, you make cooking easy and delicious with your recipes. Thanks!
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I would use orange juice in stead of the yogurt
This recipe was a disappointment. It had to bake almost an additional 25 minutes. It was dry. I wanted an applesauce cake recipe for an 8 x 8 pan as the recipe I have is for a 9 x 13. I should have stayed with my 9 x 13 recipe which is very moist. This
8 x 8 recipe when compared to my other one requires larger quantities of ingredients which I believe cause this cake to be heavy and dry and not moist at all. With all of these varied baking times I think it is the recipe not everyone’s ovens. I bake frequently and with success – this recipe need tweaking.