Apple Cinnamon Flop Breakfast Cake

Nightingale
6 days ago
3 min read

So I am back.... I hope. I know it has been a while. Little Bit and Littler Bit have gotten bigger, we've moved, work has come and gone. I am hoping, now that Littler Bit is in regular day care, to get back to trying out and posting more recipes. Bear with me, and as ever, let me know any comments, additions or questions!

The inspiration for this was an Amish recipe we grew up with for a breakfast cake (as odd an decadent a concept as that is) called Amish Cinnamon Flop. It is essentially a white cake, on top of which a butter-brown sugar-cinnamon mix is crumbled. While in the oven, the brown sugar and cinnamon sinks through the cake and caramelises at the bottom of the pan. It is rich and decadent and delicious. As would be suggested by the fact that it is a breakfast treat, it is an occasional treat, but always a delectable one. I did however decide to try to find a slightly les decadent, slightly healthier version. Given the cinnamon and brown sugar, I decided to try out adding apples and oats. I tried several different versions of this before landing on one I liked. I tried different sugars (white, brown, molasses, honey), and different amounts of fruit and flour. The final iteration has no oats, less flour, more apples and different spicing.

Recipe

Cook time: about 1 hour -- Portions: about 15 slices -- Difficulty: Easy

Ingredients:

1 1/2 c sugar

2 TBSP soft butter

1 egg

2 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp cinnamon (half coarse, half fine)

1/4 tsp ginger

1/8 tsp nutmeg

1 3/4 flour

1 c milk

2 small apples, grated

3/4 c brown sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 c soft butter

1) Cream butter and sugar then beat in egg. Mix together the dry ingredients together, then add these to the butter and sugar mixture alternately with the milk. Mix in the apples.

2) Mix together the butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. Crumble over the top of the batter.

3) Bake at 220°C for 20-30 minutes in a shallow dish. Serve warm.

I am very happy with how this came out after the different variations. The caramel no longer sinks all the way to the bottom to solidity on the base of the dish, but rather gets caught in the apple on the way down so that the cake has one single layer rather than two distinct ones. In the end, the flop is a rather different beast than the one I started with, but one I am no less pleased with. I rather enjoy it with plain yogurt or sour cream, but it is also very tasty on its own.

The oats, it turned out, made the cake too dense, and too... healthy feeling. I abandoned them after the first trial. I played around with different quantities and mixes of spices, and found that although more spicing than the original recipe was tasty with the apples, less was more when it came to the additional spices. Otherwise the different notes were drowned out. I also found that using the original quantity of flour left the cake too dense with the addition of the apple, so I adjusted this down. My attempts at changing up the sugars failed though, leaving the flavours unbalanced, so I have stuck with simple white sugar in the cake and brown sugar in the caramel crumble topping.

I still find it a little sweet for my tastes so I might keep playing with the sugar types and content.

Swaps or Substitutions:

Try adding orange zest to the crumble (or the cake).
Try adding nuts - walnuts of pecans alongside the apple to the cake.
Try swapping out the apple for other seasonal fruits (something I intend to do at the first opportunity) - peaches, plums, pears, pumpkin.