How do you like your coffee... cake

With a chill in the air, the scarves out of the closet, and the leaves changing from vibrant greens to golden reds: Fall; what's better than that! After giving out the last of the mini chocolate bars, Halloween is now officially out of the way. The jack'o'lanterns have found their way to the curb, the ghosts, ghouls, and skeletons have been boxed up and put away to scare another day, and the spider webs have mostly been gathered from the bushes - now time to focus on the next big celebration.



Apples and Cranberries

 What better way to celebrate then to blog and bake - and what's better than cake? Nothing you say... well, we agree - cake is "the end all be all" to Ms. Butters, especially since any leftover cake slices often become that night's main dinner option.

Ms Butters and Mr Crumbs are getting super excited for Christmas (the stores have all their shiny holiday nick-nacks out on display... so no, we don't think it's too early to get excited) and we decided to pull out an older copy of the LCBO's Holiday Magazines out to get in the spirit.



Apple Cranberry Tea Cake

 We wanted to have something with fruit; because fruit goes with dessert which = delicious.  We found an apple cranberry tea cake and it sounded festive enough without being too Christmas-y.

The nicest thing about this recipe is that the only thing Ms. Butters didn't have in her pantry were cranberries and they were easy enough to pick up. The recipe suggests fresh cranberries, but we like the ease of frozen - plus the grocery store hasn't gotten fresh ones yet.

Using a spring form pan, we buttered (Ms. Butters surprisingly used an appropriate amount when Mr. Crumbs would have been much more liberal) the pan and put in 2/3 of the dough and layered on the apples and cranberries. Mr. Crumbs put on the rest of the dough and Ms. Butters felt that the cake needed more cranberries (as Mr. Crumbs diced up more apples than what the recipe called for - next time read the recipe!).

We felt that this recipe worked out really well and enjoyed how easy it was to make. This cake is the best served hot out of the oven or later in the day. Ms. Butters recommends that this cake freezes well and even tastes better ice cold with a warm cup of tea or hot chocolate.

Ready for the oven!

One thing that we would do differently next time with this recipe would be to include all the ingredients, as we forgot to add the sliced almonds. To modify, we would double the cake/dough recipe and possibly add cinnamon to the dough as well as sprinkle the top of the cake with raw sugar to add a crunch and sweetness to counter the tartness of the cranberries.

P.S: LCBO is using the incorrect picture on their website, which is why our pictures look so different.