Thanksgiving Apple Loaf with Maple Syrup Buttercream

A little late to the blog this week, but I haven't been able to write about the Apple Loaf I baked for Thanksgiving, mainly due to being busy with the thing I am most thankful for in the whole world... Our little girl arrived safely on Wednesday 1st October, and we are just the most happy little family and life couldn't be better. 

So now perhaps baking isn't the baby in my life anymore!  But I have successfully baked, and one-handed baking is now a thing I should probably get used to, but it couldn't be more fun :-)

I had a bunch of apples to use and Thanksgiving dinner at my cousin-in-laws so I wanted to find a relatively easy and quick loaf recipe to bake in between feeds and changes that would work for the post-dinner, post-dessert, coffee and cake course of Thanksgiving!

I found this Apple Loaf recipe and thought it looked like just what I was looking for... As usual a few tweaks and it was just perfect!  Very moist, which meant it also kept really well too.  Give it a try this Fall!

 

Ingredients:

175g unsalted butter, softened
175g sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
225g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
25ml milk
2 medium apples, peeled, cored and grated

 

Method:

1.  Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F and grease and line a loaf tin with parchment paper.

2.  In a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

3.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition and add the vanilla extract with the last egg.

4.  Sift in the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice and mix together until combined.

5.  Add the milk and stir in.

6.  Add the grated apples and fold through so that they are evenly distributed. 

 

7.  Transfer the batter to the prepared tin and place in the preheated oven for 1 hour - 1 hour 15 minutes, until a skewer or cake tested comes out clean. 

8.  Take out of the oven and leave the cake to cool in the tin for 15 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

 

For added deliciousness I took some plain buttercream I had leftover that was in the fridge, and added 2 tablespoons of maple syrup, mixing it together to make a maple buttercream that I didn't decorate the cake with, but put in a bowl ready to be spread on the loaf (kind of like bread and butter) for people to have as much or as little of a wee bit of sweetness with their slice of apple loaf!

 

 

It has been the best October so far, and I can't wait to post more baby related crafts, sewing projects and one handed bakes soon :-)

Apple Picking and the yummy consequences!

After an amazing Summer together we fell into a very VERY busy September back at work and school and it took until October 13th for us to spend an afternoon together.  It was (almost) a beautiful Autumn day so we headed up to a local apple orchard for some apple picking!

A really great day out but then of course we had to get to work making use of all those apples!

Ideas we wanted to make were apple sauce, some kind of apple and cranberry chutney (we still had lots of cranberries left over from a trip to Bala, Muskoka earlier in the year) and of course an apple crisp!

Another new project for us was canning - so thank you Canadian Tire for our supplies.  Armed with lots of empty jars we were ready to go!

We were very surprised with the pink colour of the apple sauce!  Taste was great so no complaints!

Next was apple and cranberry chutney.  We had a little trouble finding a recipe that we liked all parts of.  We didn't only want a cranberry sauce to spoon over turkey, we definitely wanted to seal them in the jars as we wanted to give some as Christmas presents!  Also a lot of recipes were a bit 'spicy' for us.  I don't like cinnamon or a heavy clove or nutmeg flavour so we tried to avoid that.  In the end we found this recipe here from BBC's Good Food website.  We loved it all so off to work we got!

The hardest part was keeping these secret until Christmas!!

All of our canning complete there was the mandatory apple crumble to make (maybe definitely doubled the crumble part of the recipe - thanks Mum for that recipe!) but boo we forgot to take photos of that, sorry!

And then with a few of the leftover apples I tried out a recipe I found on Pinterest but originally came from this blog here.  Armed with our mandolin (again, thank you generous wedding gifts for supplying us with endless kitchen utensils!) I got slicing.  A little sprinkling of sugar (no cinnamon please) and baked them all afternoon.  They were ADDICTIVE!  Like seriously addictive.  Just a shame they take so long to cook meant you couldn't just cook them when you got the craving - but perhaps my teeth thank me for that.  

We'll definitely make these again!

So a rather long post but after such a great day out and lots of projects following it I just had to!  Enjoy Autumn!