Upside Down Green Apple, Olive Oil and Lime Cake

It’s snowing here in Dundee.  It’s beautiful but quite cold.  I say ‘quite’ because it’s been colder.  You’d think that in such weather I would migrate to warming and comforting ingredients, such as cinnamon, ginger and honey.  And normally I would.  But I’ve had this flavour combination stuck in my head and it won’t go away.  It’s persistently impelling me to make it and I’ve tried to ignore it and bake other things but it’s still there.  I feel like I just needed to make this, if for no other reason than to get it out of my system.

I was inspired to make this by, of all things, a detergent washing up liquid which was scented with ‘green apples and lime blossoms’!  When I saw those words it immediately became a flavour combination for cake and developed into that itch which wouldn’t go away. 

I had to actually go out to my local supermarket and buy Granny Smith apples and actually going out to buy ingredients for a recipe as you know, if you have read my previous posts, is not what I usually do.

I knew I wanted this to have an extreme tang to it so I wanted a recipe in which I could add the juice of the limes as well as lots of zest. 

After a little surfing of the web, I settled on this recipe which used both (juice and zest) in the cake batter and was also an oil cake which would make it very soft, light and fluffy.

A little moment of panic I had was when mixing the olive oil and lime zest and juice together, it occurred to me to add just a wee little dab of green colouring, you know, to make the cake true to name.  However, the wee dab turned into a little more by mistake (you have to be so careful I find with liquid colours) and I must have put in at least a capful. 
Thankfully it didn’t turn the cake into a sickly colour but gave it just a slight hint of green that didn’t look too bad.

This cake has an almighty zing to it.  The kind of zing which makes you salivate as the aroma hits your nose and your taste buds can literally anticipate what’s coming next.  It was too zingy for some non-adventurous individuals.  I absolutely loved it. 

During the time I had this flavour combination buzzing around in my head I knew that I wanted the green apples and lime to give me the sourest taste possible in a sweet bake.  I was so in the mood for a hit like this, especially after all the anticipation and it delivered just perfectly.  It reminds me of those green sour sweets I used to buy as a child.

The cake is beautifully soft, light and tender.  I’m really impressed with this recipe and will be trying it with other citrus combinations, although I think making it in a 9” round cake tin made the cake a little too shallow.

I soaked the green apples immediately in the lime juice and zest after slicing them, and this really helped in them retaining their delicious, tart sourness after such a long bake.  Although, they lost their crisp structure they developed into a lovely pudding like texture on top that had just the right amount of sweetness to offset the sourness from the lime juice.  I had a simple syrup of 50ml lime juice and 25g sugar prepared to douse over the cake once I had taken it out of the oven and turned it over.  However, I was unanimously stopped by everyone as it would have just been lime zing overload.

Upside Down Green Apple, Olive Oil and Lime Cake

·         2 Granny Smith apples (greenest you can find)

·         6 limes, zest of

·         160ml lime juice

·         20g butter (for greasing the bottom of the tin)

·         200g plain flour

·         ½ tsp baking powder

·         ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

·         Pinch of salt

·         2 eggs

·         350g caster sugar

·         160ml olive oil

Cut the apples into halves, then each half into a quarter, then each quarter into three pieces (you should get 12 pieces from each apple – 24 pieces in total).  Place these immediately in a bowl with the lime juice and zest to prevent them from browning.  Leave for about 15 minutes if you can.

Preheat the oven to 180C and prepare a 9” round cake tin with greaseproof paper or foil.  Take about 20g of butter and thoroughly grease the bottom of the tin – leave pieces of remaining butter dotted around on the bottom.  Lay the apple slices in a concentric circle on the bottom of the tin.  Try to fit them all in as best you can.

Mix the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt together in a medium bowl.  Beat the two eggs until increased in volume and pale yellow (it took me a good 5-7 minutes to achieve this with a handheld electric whisk).  Gradually add the sugar to eggs, whisking as you do.  The mixture will become thick.

In a separate bowl, whisk the olive oil with the lime zest and juice.  Make sure the juice is still 160ml and it hasn’t decreased too much from the apple soaking (six medium sized limes should give you more than 160ml juice so just top up if you find it has decreased). 

Alternately mix the flour mixture and oil mixture into the eggs, starting and finishing with the dry ingredients.  Pour over the apples in the tin and bake for about 50 minutes.  After 30 minutes you might want to add a foil cap on top to prevent it from browning too much.  Mines took 1 hour in total to bake.

 

Below are pictures of the snow in our garden: