A fabulously versatile cake: it makes a lovely coffee morning offering; a great hot dessert with cream or custard; or just an afternoon treat. I use up all the bruised apples floating around at the bottom of the fruit bowl for it. Give it a try, it’s absolutely delicious.

Original recipe taken from Family Circle Summer Recipes magazine. They recommend using a 900g loaf tin, but I used a square cake tin to make a more shallow cake.

Ingredients:

3 eggs

225g caster sugar

100g butter, softened

1 tsp vanilla essence

175g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

75ml milk

115g ground almonds

75g marzipan, diced

350g dessert apples, peeled, cored & diced. Not cooking apples, they’ll break down too much. Dessert apples will stay in chunks.

25g flaked almonds

tbsp icing sugar

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180c, Gas 4. Grease the tin and line with baking parchment.

Place the eggs, sugar, butter & vanilla essence in a stand mixer and whisk until smooth.

Sift in the flour & baking powder, and add to the egg, whisk briefly then add the milk, ground almonds & marzipan. Gently whisk until mixed.

Stir in the diced apple and pour the batter into the prepared tin. Level the top and sprinkle with the flaked almonds.

Bake for 1 hr, checking after 50 minutes.  If a skewer comes out clean, it’s done. If the cake’s still sticky but browning too much, pop a bit of foil over the top and return to the oven for a further 10 mins or until cooked.

Leave to cool in the tin, then cut into squares, dust with icing sugar and serve.