Apple butter cake

Ingredients: 
250g salted butter, soften and cut into smaller pieces 
180g castor sugar 
4 eggs, at room temperature 
200g top flour 
1 and 1/4 tsp baking powder 
2 apples (skinned, cored and cut into cubes) 
2 tbsp blueberry jam 


Method: 
1. Grease and line a 20 cm baking tin. 
2. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. 
3. Add in eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly before each addition. 
4. Sift flour, baking powder and cinnamon powder together and fold into butter mixture in batches. 
5. Add in apples and raisins. 
6. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 deg C for 50 mins. 


What I did: 
1. I used my Philips stand mixer at speed 1 for the beating and folding, and used a plastic spatula to fold in the apple slices and raisins. 
2. I used Pacific Rose apples which are naturally sweet, so I have reduced the sugar by 20g. 
3. While adding eggs one by one, I let the yolk into the butter mixture first, then the whites before the yolk is fully incorporated into the butter mixture. Then another yolk, followed by another white until I used up all the eggs. Dun know if this helps to prevent curdling. 
4. I find it hard to fold the apple slices and rasins together properly. Next time I will fold in the raisins first, then the apple slices. Btw I like thick slices of apples so my slices are slightly thicker than 1 cm. 
5. The amt of cinnamon powder seems to be too little. The smell was fragnant while the cake was baking in the oven, but barely there once the cake cooled down. Maybe I will use 1/2 tsp next time. 
6. The amt of raisins also is too little to me. I think 100g will be better. 
7. As my apple slices were thick, the batter once poured into the baking tin did not smooth out easily. So I banged the tin 5 times to loosen the gaps in the batter before baking. 


by Jennifer Quah