Apple cake

You need a 9" springform pan for this one. And some apples that are good for baking, like the tart, sort of dry ones.

Preheat oven to 400. Peel, core, and slice 4 medium or 5 small apples into wedges, 10-12 wedges per apple.

1/2 c. flour
1/3 c. sugar
1 T baking powder
1/8 t. salt

Put the above in a bowl and whisk it around to mix.

2 eggs
1/3 c. milk
2 T vegetable oil
1/2 t. vanilla

Put the above in a small bowl and mix.

Put the wet and dry ingredients together. Fold in the apple wedges. The object of this game is to coat the apple wedges thoroughly. Pour the batter into the greased springform pan. IMPORTANT: put the springform pan on a baking sheet to catch any drips. You may think that the springform pan seals well enough to prevent dribbling out the bottom, but you'd be wrong. And then you'd race downstairs at the smell of burning something-or-other only to discover your mistake. Your smelly, smelly mistake.
Bake 25 minutes or so, until it's golden and firm on top. In the meantime, whip up the custard topping:

1 egg
1/3 c. sugar
3 T melted butter
Mix all this together well and pour over the cake. Stick it back in the oven for another 10 minutes, or until the custard is set.

Cool on a rack, and dive in. No ice cream required for this one...

Rustic Plum Cake

I know you're thinking, "Plums? In a cake? Nah, I'll just have the standard chocolate-with-chocolate frosting." Well, my friend, you would've made the wrong choice. This cake is super good, and easy to boot, since you make the batter in a food processor. The recipe is from Cook's Illustrated, but I ran short on, or didn't have some ingredients, so I improvised.

2T red currant or seedless raspberry jam (I had huckleberry jam from the mother-in-law's trip through Montana)
3T brandy (I used water--you basically just need something to dilute the jam to make syrup)
1 pound Italian prune plums, halved and pitted (This is about 12 plums. Italian plums are the little sort of oblong ones)

3/4 c. sugar
1/3 c. slivered almonds (I didn't have quite enough, so I filled out the amount with walnuts, no harm done)
3/4 c. all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the pan
1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
6T unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces, softened but still cool
1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
1 t. vanilla extract
1/4 t. almond extract (optional: I left it out)

1. Cook jam and brandy/water in a 10-inch skillet 2-3 minutes until reduced to a thick syrup. They say to use nonstick, but I don't have one of those, and my regular old stainless-steel worked fine. Remove skillet from heat and place the plums cut-side down in the syrup. Return skillet to medium heat and cook until plums start to release their juices and a thick syrup forms again, about 5 minutes. While this is going on, shake the pan a few times to keep the plums from sticking. Cool plums in the pan while you make the batter.

2. Put oven rack in the middle and preheat to 350. Grease and flour a 9" springform pan. If you don't have a springform pan, just use a regular 9" cake pan like I did, but make sure you cover all inside surfaces well in the greasing-and-flouring process.

3. In a food processor, process almonds and sugar together until the nuts are finely ground. Add flour, baking powder, and salt, and pulse to combine. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse sand, about ten 1-second pulses. This may take a little longer if, like me, you were impatient and didn't let the butter soften enough. Add eggs, vanilla, and almond extract (if you're using it), and process until smooth, about 5 seconds, scraping the bowl if necessary. This batter is quite thick.

4. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, and spread it around evenly with a spatula. You really have to make sure you keep the batter ahead of the spatula and push it to the edges of the pan. Now, for the plums! Stir them around a bit to get them coated with syrup. By hand, or with a spoon, place the plums one at a time into the batter, cut side up. 12 should be just enough to cover the surface with two concentric circles and one in the middle.

5. Bake 40-50 minutes, or until a wooden skewer or toothpick comes out with a few crumbs attached. If you used a cake pan like I did, let the cake cool for 15-30 min. before you do the magic flip. Invert a dinner plate or cooling rack or other big flat surface onto the pan, then flip both over so the cake falls out upside down onto the plate. Repeat with a serving platter so the cake ends up right side up and ready to serve. Dust it with some confectioner's sugar while you're at it.

Fun with whole wheat

These are some fine cookies. No ifs, ands, or buts about the lack of white flour. They're just plain excellent cookies.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

3/4 c. rolled oats
1 c. whole wheat flour
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1/4 c. (1/2 stick) butter, softened
1/4 c. canola oil (or vegetable oil)
1/3 c. sugar
1/3 c. brown sugar
1 egg
1 t. vanilla
1 c. chocolate chips (dark chocolate is the best)
A handful of nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Using a blender or a food processor, grind the oats until they resemble flour. I used quick-cooking oats which are flimsier than traditional oats, so it didn't take but a few seconds. Mix the oat flour with the dry ingredients in a bowl.
In a mixer with that paddle beater, not the whisk one, beat the butter until "fluffy." This "fluffy" state has never been particularly apparent to me, but I just beat until it starts to lighten in color a little bit. Add oil, sugars, egg, and vanilla, and beat until smooth and creamy.
With the mixer still running, add the dry ingredients and quit mixing when they're incorporated. One of these looks like it would make the job easier, but otherwise, just be vigilant. If you have a KitchenAid (what my sister calls "the concrete mixer"), you've experienced shock and awe at flying ingredients; or at the least, a cloud of flour that blinds and thwarts your baking plans.
Dump in the chocolate chips and/or nuts and mix. The batter is pretty stiff, but you can do it by hand if you're afraid of murdering the chips and nut bits. If you live without air conditioning, keep your chips in the fridge. Otherwise you'll end up with melted chocolate streaks throughout the dough. Not that I'd know anything about this.
Drop little wads of dough a little smaller than a golf ball on a couple baking sheets--it's a crumbly batter, especially if you put nuts in too, so you may need to do some hand-shaping and squeezing to get them to become real cookies. Bake until the cookies are firm around the edges and golden on top, about 15 minutes.

This is NOT a low-calorie food, but you get a bonus of 1g of fiber for each cookie!

The best chocolate cake around. Seriously.

CHOCOLATE SOUR CREAM CAKE

2 1/4 oz natural cocoa (not Dutch processed) (Note: I didn't weigh the cocoa, but I estimated just over 1/4 of the 8-oz. box, dumped out that much in the bowl, and that seems to have been the right amount.)
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped very fine or grated
1 tsp instant espresso powder (Note: I used a heaping tablespoon of instant coffee)
3/4 cup boiling water
1 cup sour cream, room temp
8 3/4 oz (1 3/4 cups) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
12 tablespoons (6 oz) unsalted butter, room temp
14 oz (2 cups) packed light brown sugar (Note: I ran out of brown sugar and had to substitute about 1/4 c. white sugar. It turned out fine, but don't substitute too much.)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
5 large eggs, room temp

Heavy cream for whipping, and raspberries (optional, but highly recommended)

1. To line the pan, either use some fancy-dancy "cake release spray" or do it like the America's Test Kitchens people did. Melt some butter and dump some cocoa in it until it looks good enough to pour on anything you can think of. Do NOT attempt to taste this mixture, no matter how good it looks or smells. You'll spend the next several minutes hacking and spitting, and your faith in chocolate will be shaken. Use a fancy-dancy "pastry brush" or a little paintbrush you bought several years ago and have to monitor for shedding bristles now and then to paint the inside of the bundt pan. This is so the outside of the cake doesn't have the bitterness of the butter-and-flour method, or at least that's what I remember the America's Test Kitchens people saying.

2. Grate or chop the chocolate. This takes a while, and one gets bored, so make sure the radio is on with a really interesting interview or something. I would suggest making this cake around 1 to 2pm, when Fresh Air is on.
Preheat the oven to 350, and put the rack in the lower third of the oven.

3. Put the 3/4 c. water on to boil. Dump the cocoa, chopped/grated chocolate, and espresso powder in a medium heatproof bowl (I used my smaller stainless steel mixing bowl). When the water boils, pour that in and whisk the hell out of it until it looks smooth and yummy. Again, do NOT attempt to taste this, for the reasons mentioned above. The original recipe says to set it aside to cool it to room temp, but I just set the bowl in my bigger stainless steel bowl with some ice water and stirred it there for a minute or so. When it cools to room temp, whisk in the sour cream until it's all incorporated and a lovely creamy brown color.
In another bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda. You could do it in a sifter, but you have to do the whole dry ingredients-wet ingredients-dry ingredients-wet ingredients thing so it's easier if it's in a bowl.

4. If you're not as stubborn as me, and you don't love your whisk like I do, go to the mixer with the butter, sugar, and vanilla, and beat that together until "pale and fluffy," although I have to say I don't think I've ever seen this mixture become particularly fluffy. Maybe I'm missing something. The recipe says to beat it in the mixer for about 3 minutes. I think this translated to 5 minutes by hand, but I just beat it until the mixture was consistent and the color I was thinking of painting the dining room at one point. How's that for precision? If you're using a mixer, reduce speed to medium and add the eggs one at a time, incorporating them fully after each addition. If you're using your arm and a whisk, disregard the instructions about speed and add the eggs one at a time, incorporating them fully after each addition.

5. If you're using a mixer, make sure you scrape the sides of the bowl down so you don't get chunks of unmixed ingredients in the finished product. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture and incorporate it fully; add 1/2 of the chocolate mixture and incorporate it; repeat with another 1/3 of the flour; the other half of the chocolate; and the remaining flour. Don't overmix--mix just until it's consistent throughout, and then stand back and see how pretty the finished batter is. You're in safe territory as far as tasting at this stage, unless raw eggs in the batter turn you off (I personally don't have a problem with this, having eaten my weight in cookie batter over the years).

6. This is a thick batter, and pouring into a bundt pan is usually a pain in the neck. I found that scooping it out one spatula-full at a time worked better than trying to pour around the circle. To get rid of air bubbles or whatnot, pick up the full pan and thunk it on the counter a few times. Stick it in the oven and go do something else for 45-50 minutes. Do the wooden skewer test to check for doneness. When you're satisfied that it's not still liquid on the inside, put an upside-down cooling rack on the top and flip the pan over to cool for a couple hours or so, after which point the cake should pop right out of the pan.

7. Fresh whipped cream is so good, and so easy you shouldn't even think of doing the Cool Whip thing, and ice cream is just way too heavy and sweet for this cake. My years of experience (torture) in the kitchen at 15th & Olive on dessert duty taught me that the quickest, easiest, and best way to go about it is to take a stainless-steel bowl of a size that allows you to move the whisk around in heavy cream of sufficient depth (not more than 1/2" or so or else you'll be whisking all night), stick that in a larger bowl with ice, and whisk away. Cream that's too warm won't peak like it should. You're not so much stirring as beating--the goal is to get air into the cream so this part of the process creates a racket, especially if you're using a metal bowl with a metal whisk. Once you get some volume, but not stiffness, sprinkle in some powdered sugar and continue whisking. You should add a little at a time and taste along the way. It can get really sweet really quickly. Cut a slice of your cake, dump a dollop of whipped cream on it, and throw some raspberries on top. A sprig of mint looks awful purty on top, and if you have mint growing anywhere around your house, you can undoubtedly spare a sprig or fifty.