Apple Cake: Best Version Yet!

Autumn is apple season in Vermont, and last month when Dave's sis visited, I celebrated by baking an apple cake. (She helped!) This one is made with Empire apples -- not as soft as a Mcintosh, but still soft enough to give the right "feel" after baking. I've also fine-tuned the recipe in some other ways: There is a "secret ingredient" that I've adopted after seeing it in a few recipes that King Arthur Flour provides. It's an extract called Fiori Di Sicilia (flowers of Sicily, yes?) and mingles vanilla and citrus at once. If you don't have access to it, substitute a tablespoon of freshly grated orange rind and an extra half teaspoon of vanilla -- but I really like the way this extract scents the entire cake.

Here we go:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a tube pan, preferably the kind that comes as two pieces (in a pinch you can do this in a pair of 9 by 5 inch bread pans, but it's prettier with the tube pan).

Stir together:
2 tsp cinnamon
1/3 cup sugar

Peel and slice 5 large apples (Empire preferred; should amount to 5 cups) and place the slices in a large bowl; stir in the cinnamon-sugar mix and let sit while you do the rest.

Beat in large mixer bowl:
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup orange juice
1-1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla
few drops (about 1/8 tsp) Fiori Di Sicilia (see note above)

In a separate bowl stir together:
3 cups unbleached flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Add the dry ingredients to the mixer bowl and beat only until well mixed.

Layer by thirds into the pan: one-third of the batter, then lay onto it one-third of the apples, and repeat twice more. If you're particular, make sure to save the prettiest apple slices for the top layer.

Bake 1-1/2 hours until golden on top. (If you used bread pans, start checking after just 1 hour.) Let cool 10 minutes and then remove the outer part of the tube pan. If it works for you, carefully lift the cake off the inner part, too. (It almost never works that way for me, so I slice the cooled cake carefully until the remainder will come off the inner part of the pan. Nothing wrong with serving this as a platter of slices!)

A note about the recipe: This version began from a Joan Nathan version that she calls "Jewish" Apple Cake, noting that the fact that the cake is made with oil, not butter, may have encouraged the name. Note that many "Jewish" apple cake recipes are designed to have layers of apple that ripple more in the finished cake. The rise in the oven will separate these slices enough, though, so that the finished cake is less regular than the layering makes it sound. I have also tried this with 1 of the cups of flour replaced with a finely ground whole wheat flour, which worked well; more than that, and Dave would realize that I was trying to turn the dessert into something overly "healthy."