Easy Apple Cake Recipe to Bake with Kids

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We’re doing our best to keep busy at home while social distancing is recommended. We left our Manhattan home and are staying with my in-laws in NJ to give the kids more space and to have extra hands while the kids are home from school.

I’ve been sharing our daily activities on Instagram stories (check them out here). When I shared footage of Sam baking this cake, I got lots of requests for the recipe.

Sam is now five and has been baking this cake every time that he visits his grandparents for the past few years.

My mother-in-law doesn’t even own measuring spoons or cups but I guesstimated the ingredients and tried it myself and it came out great. The point is, that it’s easy to involve kids and really hard to mess this recipe up!!

Disclaimer: the blog post was an after thought, so I just used photos that we had on hand. I will try to update the photos the next time we bake this cake!

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Ingredients

  • 4-5 fresh apples (prefer Granny Smith), can substitute fresh blueberries

  • 4 eggs

  • 1/2 c. oil (sunflower, etc.) — I was once short ingredients and substituted half melted butter and half coconut oil and it turned out great

  • 1/2 c sugar

  • 1 c white flour (or 1/2 c white flour and 1/2 c whole wheat flour)

  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

  • 1 t vanilla extract

  • 1.5t + additional 1 t Chambord or rum (optional)

  • Apricot jam or preserves (for final step)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350

Prepare batter: Reserve the apples, the reserved teaspoon of alcohol and the jam for later steps. Mix remaining ingredients in a bowl one by one, mixing after each ingredient.

Spray a large round or 8x11 baking dish with oil. The exact size of the dish doesn’t matter much.

Peel and quarter the apples, remove seeds.

Slice each quarter into about 8 slices (the short way so you have similar sized small pieces that resemble triangles)

Arrange the sliced quarters in the dish (keeping the slices of each quarter together).

If there is leftover space, shift the apple pieces so that they are at more of a diagonal angle to fill out the dish.

Slices can be placed densely/overlap, the cake will rise between and around them.

Drizzle the batter over the apples.

Clean up edges of dish with a damp paper towel to avoid burning the drips of batter (we skipped this step, and you can tell from the final photo).

Bake 45-50 min

Mix some apricot jam with the reserved teaspoon of alcohol. Break up the jam so it’s relatively smooth.

Remove cake from oven and spoon the apricot jam mixture on top and then smooth out with a pastry brush

Bake additional 10-15 minutes.

Enjoy!