Apple Molasses Gingerbread Cake
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This may be my favorite cake...ever. I've been making it for several years now and honestly, I still just can't get over how good it is. So unbelievably moist and loaded with apples, raisins, mosasses, ginger and all things good in this life. I'm not kidding, this is what you want your house to smell like...every day. And this is the cake you want to eat on a chilly fall afternoon with your favorite cup of tea, thumbing through your treasured copies of Gourmet magazine. We had it for dessert last night and again with our eggs at breakfast this morning. It's that kind of cake. Did I mention the vanilla glaze? Bonus!
Maybe that's about all I can say, except that if you love gingerbread and you love cake, you must make this. And if you don't, make it anyway, it just might change your mind.
Apple Molasses Gingerbread Cake
For the cake:
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup butter, room temp
½ cup sugar
1 large egg, beaten
1 cup molasses mixed with 1 cup hot water
½ cup raisins
2 golden delicious apples, (or any good baking apple), diced
Glaze
2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
2 tsp vanilla
milk (just enough to make a spreadable glaze or add more milk and drizzle the glaze over the cake)
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Grease a 10" springform pan with butter or cooking spray. Sift together flour, baking soda, spices, and salt.
Beat together butter, sugar, and egg in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until creamy, about 2 minutes. In 3 batches, alternately beat in flour mixture and molasses mixture at low speed until smooth. Add the chopped apples and the raisins. Mix well. Pour batter into the greased springform pan.
Bake cake in middle of oven until a tester comes out clean, for about 45 minutes. Cool cake about 15 minutes in the pan on a rack and then remove from springform and allow to finish cooling on the rack.
Mix glaze ingredients and put in a Ziploc bag with a hole cut in the corner. Pipe glaze onto the cake or if you’d like a thinner, drizzle of glaze, add more milk and use a spatula to drizzle the glaze over the top of the cake.
