Making apple cakes

I’ve already started putting the apple harvest to good use. The Bramley's make excellent Apple Cakes using a simple recipe:

Ingredients: 
1¾ cups plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
½ cup butter
½ cup sugar, plus 2 tbsp
1 egg, beaten
½ cup milk
1 large cooking apple (12oz or more)
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas Mark 4.
2. Butter a 10-inch pie tin or a Pyrex plate (great for shallow pies too).
3. Mix the flour and baking powder. Rub in the butter to produce a texture like breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, beaten egg and milk to form a soft dough. Pat out half of the very wet dough in the greased pie tin.
4. Peel, core and chop the apple into 2cm cubes. Cover the dough with the apples and sprinkle with 1 tbsp sugar and the cinnamon.
5. Gently spoon out the remaining dough on top of the apples to cover them completely. Sprinkle with the remaining 1 tbsp. sugar and cut a slit through the middle of the top dough.
6. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until golden on the outside.

The Bramley's do equally well in apple pies and, thanks to a very late and bountiful blackberry harvest (I picked what will probably be the last of them today), my favourite - blackberry and apple pie.

We’ve been eating the Sunset apples as whole fruit since mid-September and I’ve put a few dozen and a similar weight of Bramley's into storage to use over the next couple of months.

On Thursday I should be pressing the remaining fruit to make cider.