A wonderful, moist cinnamon cake hiding a delicious cooked apple and brown sugar filling. 

THE INGREDIENTS: 

The Cake: 

Cake Flour: Although desserts such as a flourless chocolate cake exist, flour is needed for most cake recipes to have structure. Although all purpose flour is a common flour, we like to use cake flour for this recipe. It leads to a lighter, fluffier texture. If you don’t have cake flour on hand, we say reach for ¾ cup + 2 tablespoons of all purpose flour and 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. 

Brown Sugar: What goes better than brown sugar and apples? Well, maybe brown sugar and cinnamon! We love the flavor combination of molasses-rich brown sugar with fall flavors. As a bonus, brown sugar adds a bit more moisture than white sugar does. This makes a cake where the word “dry” doesn’t come to mind at all! 

White Sugar: As much as we love brown sugar, too much of a good thing is, well, a thing! Brown sugar may bring extra flavor and moisture (as well as obvious sweetness), but it can also make a denser cake. To keep things fluffy, we supplement brown sugar with white sugar. 

Baking Soda: A cake or a brick, what a hard choice…not! To help this cake rise and not be an overly dense mess, we have baking soda as a key ingredient. Baking soda is stronger than baking powder, but needs an acid in order to be activated. So, you cannot replace baking soda 1:1 with baking powder. We say it’s best to have both on hand. Replacing one with another can work, but it also adds an element of risk to this recipe. We don’t want risk here! 

Cinnamon: If we are making an apple dessert, it’s a fair assumption that we’re also putting cinnamon in it! Cinnamon is a wonderful fall flavor that makes apples shine. We think we have just the right amount, so we don’t recommend going higher or lower. 

Salt: A little bit of salt really helps to appreciate the sweetness! You can reduce the salt to ¼ teaspoon if you like, but we definitely don’t recommend increasing it. 

Milk: We have found that cakes with lighter batters rise better than cakes with thicker batters. So, to lighten things up, we need to add more liquid! We chose milk because it adds a little bit of richness. Not only that, but it helps contribute to a softer, fluffier cake. If you don’t have milk on hand, don’t worry! If you use water instead, this cake will still turn out! Any kind of milk works, from skim to whole, but also know half and half can be used in this cake if you have some to use up. 

Eggs: Luckily, you can’t taste eggs in cake! Without them, though, this cake would be nowhere near as good. Weird, right? Eggs help to bring our dry and wet ingredients together, as well as ensure our fats and milk mix into a cohesive blend. Eggs are not something you want to change in this recipe! 

Yogurt: You may have heard of adding sour cream to cakes, but what about yogurt? We add just a little bit of yogurt to this cake recipe, but our cinnamon apple cake would not be the same without it. We have other ingredients contributing to fluffiness, and this ingredient adds even MORE lightness. It also adds moisture, making this for one of our moistest cakes on the blog. You can use low fat or high fat yogurt, we usually use whatever we have on hand. We’d go for plain, but this is a recipe where you could use vanilla yogurt, cinnamon yogurt, or apple yogurt, if you can find any. 

Vegetable Oil: Cake thrives as a moist dessert, so we add some vegetable oil to this recipe to contribute moisture. Butter and oil may both be fats, but butter makes a drier cake than its oil counterpart. 

White Distilled Vinegar: Just a little splash of vinegar can make a world of difference! The leavening agent that we use in this cake recipe is baking soda, which needs an acid in order to activate its rising power. Adding this acid means your baking soda’s effect is stronger, which also means you get the best rise! Perfect for a cake that is as fluffy as can be. 

THE FILLING: 

Apples: It wouldn’t be an apple cake without apples! We’ve gone back and forth for this cake recipe. Do we add 1, 2, or 3? There’s actually a lot of cake and apple bread recipes that just use 1 apple, but the difference is they put it into the middle while it’s raw. While it bakes, it cooks and contributes more moisture to the dessert. With that being said, any more moisture in our cake and it would be more of a “wet mess” than “delectable treat”. Also, just 1 apple, really? To really ensure plenty of fruit, we like to use 3 in this recipe. Although, when we have large apples, we do stick to 2.

By pre-cooking them, we strengthen their flavor and the apples do shrink, lose their excess moisture, and develop a better texture. This means we can fit more apples in the cake. If you were to add 3 diced raw apples to a cake, you’d almost have apple pie! This is that cake for when you bought a bag of apples, any kind, and just can’t get through the last few. So, no need to hunt for the best granny smiths the market has to offer. We’ve used whatever kind of apple we have on hand and always been pleased with the result. 

Brown Sugar: Although you can use white or brown sugar here, let us give our argument for why brown sugar is the better choice. Brown sugar quickly leads to a caramel like coating on the apples, making them gooey and delectable. Not only that, but brown sugar has more flavor than its white counterpart. That molasses flavor goes very well with spice cakes and apples. Since we have a spice, cinnamon, and apples in our cake, it’s clear to see brown sugar fits here! 

Cinnamon: Although we have cinnamon in the cake batter, we like to make sure “cinnamon” is worthy of being the first word in this cake recipe by adding it to the filling as well. It pairs wonderfully with the apples and you’d miss it if it weren’t there. 

Water: This ingredient may seem like an odd one. Why not just cook the apples down in butter? That’s a common method, after all. When we’ve cooked the apples down in butter in the past, we’ve found the cake tastes the same as when we cook the apples with water. The butter just doesn’t contribute enough flavor to stand out against all of the other components in this cake recipe. Since butter can be more expensive and is much more necessary for other recipes, why not just use water and save the butter?

Adding just a bit of water helps the apples start to soften until they start releasing their own juices. Without water, the apples would stick to the pan and you’d have a mess instead of cooked apples. Depending on how high of a heat you are using, you may need to add a bit more water. In other scenarios, you may even have to turn up the heat at the end to cook off any excess water. We don’t want any more moisture going into the cake! 

KEY INFORMATION: 

Why Use Cake Flour? Cake flour may seem similar to all purpose flour, but it actually has less protein. Less protein means less gluten. Gluten is what makes for chewy desserts. So, cake flour makes lighter, fluffier desserts instead of denser, chewier desserts. This is especially important for cake! If you don’t have cake flour on hand, simply replace each cup of cake flour with ¾ cup + 2 tablespoons of all purpose flour and 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. 

Why Do Apples Sink In Cake Batter? When a cake batter is thin, apples tend to sink to the bottom of the cake. With that being said, a thin cake batter is key to our texture and flavor, so it just can’t be changed. The apples may not normally stay in the middle, but what matters most is flavor! If you want to prevent the apples from going all the way to the bottom of the cake, you can add more cake batter underneath them. Just make sure the apples are still covered with cake batter on top before baking the cake.

What Goes With Cinnamon Apple Cake? We’ll address this three ways: what kind of meal makes you crave cinnamon apple cake as the dessert, what goes with a slice of cinnamon apple cake, and what desserts can you serve if you’re also serving cinnamon apple cake. 

For us, cinnamon apple cake has fall written all over it. This means anything with sweet potato would lead us right to this dessert. Take sweet potato gnocchi, for example. Otherwise, good fall meals are Cauliflower Alfredo Pizza or Swiss, Mushroom, and Onion Quiche!