A few of the Ida Red apples that we picked
Taking advantage of the one day of sunshine, my host family and I went apple picking on Thursday. We (Opa, Antje, Mina and I) drove to a nearby Dorf (village) in Brandenburg (the Bundesland that surrounds Berlin.) There we found a farm with an open apple orchard. For 50 cent a kg, they allow you to pick as many apples as you want (all apples eaten on the premises are free of charge, and as I am sure you can imagine, we took full advantage of this bonus =)
We picked so many apples, and of so many different varieties: Golden Delicious (yellowish and sweeter,) Champions (smaller apples, but very crisp,) Boscop (very sour-Oma’s favorite,) Elsa (Opa’s favorite,) and Ida Red (a larger, bright red apple with a sweet-sour bite- my favorite.) All together, we picked around 30 kg! By the end, our hands and noses were red from the cold, and our bellies bursting from sampling.
However, my apple picking for the week did not end there. In our garden, we have a large and quite old apple tree. Oma’s father planted the tree over 60 years ago, and it has faithfully produced many delicious Ontario apples ever since. Being the tallest, youngest member of the apple pickers (Opa is 6’5’’, but he is too old to count,) it was my job to climb the ladder and harvest these wonderful apples before the bugs got to them. Standing on a rickety, old ladder, a basket full of apples balanced under my arm, and decked out in jacket, scarf, hat and gloves, I picked every single apple hanging in that tree. Proudly, I showed my four baskets, filled to the brim with apples, to Antje who exclaimed, “we should bake a cake!”
The cake recipe we used was one of Antje’s specialties. It is pretty much a light, buttery cake with a fruit topping (plums, pears, apples, whatever is in season.) This was my first time baking a German cake, and it was quite an experience. In Germany, they do not use cups, but rather grams when cooking. However, because using a scale to measure would be un-necessarily tedious, they have this nifty measuring pitcher. Around the outside of the pitcher are the names of different goods (like milk, water, sugar, flour, rice, etc.) and then (just like our measuring cups) it says how many 100, 200, 300, etc, grams. Each good is listed individually, because different goods weight different amounts. For example, the quantity of 200 g of sugar is about half the amount as the quantity of 200g of flour.
After showing me where to find the bowls and mixer, Antje started peeling and cutting the apples, leaving me with the cake batter and the German recipe. After carefully reading, and re-reading the instructions, being sure not to miss any important steps, I started mixing the ingredients. First I mixed the eggs, sugar, vanilla sugar and a lot of butter (200 g!) together. Then came the flour, baking powder (they don’t use baking soda for baking in Germany,) and salt. Then the recipe said to mix the batter for five minutes, straight. According to Antje, the more you mix your cake batter, the lighter and fluffier it will be. This was a little different from my past cooking experiences. Because we usually make “quick” breads with baking soda at home, normally I am “reminded” by my mother to not over-mix the batter =) However, if the recipe said to mix the batter for five minutes, then I was going to mix it for five minutes (just to be safe, though, I ended up mixing it for seven. I like fluffy cakes.) Afterwords, I added a little bit of milk, poured the batter into the spring form pan, and artistically arranged the apples on top. As a finishing touch, we sprinkled roasted almonds and sugar onto the finished cake. Finally came the moment of truth…the taste test!
The cake was simply delicious, light, buttery, sweet cake with soft, sugary apples with a final crunch of the almonds. My extra two minutes of mixing definitely paid off, because the cake was definitely fluffy! Along with the cake, we also made several pots of applesauce, and there is still a plethora of apples in the cellar. My doctor should be proud, because this winter I will definitely not be missing my “apple a day!”
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