This week’s recipe is Russian Grandmother’s Apple Pie Cake, chosen by Natalie of Burned Bits.

The name Russian Grandmother’s Apple Pie-Cake. Pie-Cake? In reading the recipe you will notice that this is not a traditional cake that has a batter which is poured into a pan and baked. The components are of a pie recipe; a dough and a filling. This confused me, especially since the book did not have any pictures.

Preparing the recipe was simple. The dough was easy put together, I didn’t have any problems with stickiness. It took about 15 minutes total. It had a lemony taste to it which I found weird, but after refrigeration the lemony taste was still there but not that strong. It rolled out pretty easy once I let it come back to room temperature.

The filling was exactly that – apple pie filling. Apples, golden raisins, sugar and cinnamon. I used a combo of granny smiths and golden delicious since that is what I had on hand. I didn’t have any non-colored sanding sugar so I just sprinkled it with cinnamon-sugar instead.

After baking for 80 minutes, I checked on it. The top was brown and juices were bubbling so I removed it from the oven and set it on a rack to cool. Once it cooled down (still slightly warm) I tasted it. Some of apples were a little too soft, almost mushy. Also even though I tasted the apples before they were cooked, they were a little too tart, but that may be attributed to the type of apples I used. The next day I tried another piece (at room temperature) – this time the flavors seemed a little more settled together and, any apples that were too soft complimented the apples which were still chunky. I could have skipped the raisins. By day three I had “grown to like it”.

Even though I was not completely sold on this recipe my family really enjoyed it.

Is it a pie or a cake? Not sure, to me it was more like a cobbler.

I will definitely keep the dough recipe to use again and play around with different fillings.

For printable version of the recipe click here

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Last week: Snickery Squares

Next week: Brioche Raisin Snails