Italian apple cake: recipe and video recipe

Author: Veruska Anconitano, Award-Winning Food Travel Journalist, Sommelier & Outdoor LoverAuthor information
Veruska
About the author
Veruska Anconitano
Veruska is a a food travel journalist with awards to her credit, such as World Best Food Travel Journalist. She holds a certification as a sommelier and she is also an ardent lover of the outdoors. Aside from this, Veruska is a Multilingual SEO and Localization Consultant and co-owns multiple websites that cater to a global audience.
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If there’s one truly Italian recipe every foreigner should taste at least one I’m sure it’s the homemade apple cake or torta di mele: if you think it’s just another apple pie you’re totally wrong. A real Italian apple pie tastes just delicious and it smells like heaven. It’s something you learn to cook when you’re very young because your mum and your grandmas cook, it’s a traditional and a family recipe, unmissable for any baker and so different from home to home.

Every time I bake it at my place or during my classes I feel at home in Italy surrounded by my parents and my friends, each of us eating a piece of pie and questioning about what’s missing and how the recipe should be improved. At the end of the day it’s a family recipe and everyone is entitled to have a specific version of it and to complain about yours.

Italian apple cake: ingredients for a 23cm round baking pan

700 grams of apples
3 eggs
50 grams of butter
300 grams of flour
200 grams of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 glass of milk
Grated rind and juice of one lemon

Italian apple cake: recipe

  1. Peel the apples, cut them in thin slices and sprinkle with the lemon juice. Leave them aside while making the batter.
  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff and in a different bowl whisk the egg yolks with the sugar. Combine the two mixtures and mix thoroughly.
  3. Add the flour, the lemon zest and the butter cut into cubes then pour the milk and the baking powder into the mixture and beat to get a homogeneous and smooth batter.
  4. Stir in the apples and leave a few slices aside to decorate the pie. Butter the baking pan and sprinkle it with some sugar then cover the surface with a few slices of apple
  5. Pour in the mixture, sprinkle with more sugar and bake for 30 minutes at 200° C (390°F).
  6. When it is ready (insert a thin skewer, a toothpick or a cake tester into the center of the cake and the cake is ready when the skewer comes out clean with no streaks of batter), remove from the oven, overturn it on wire rack and let it cool.

Preparation time: about 1 hour but it also depends by your oven

Check out my video recipe and subscribe to my channel for more recipes:

 

Torta di mele

How to make a perfect homemade Italian apple cake

1. Try to use golden apples because they’re less juicy and they fit perfectly with this batter;
2. Do not think to avoid the lemon zest because it’s essential to give the pie its flavor;
3. You can’t replace the batter with the pie crust because you won’t get anything like the Italian apple pie and you will waste a lot of your time to be, at the end, disappointed;
4. If you bake this cake around Christmas or in autumn you can add a little bit of ground cinnamon to give the cake a festive taste

[Pics by Giuseppe Milo]

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