A Perfect Cake for Fall or Winter

C racker Barrel’s best dish, hands down, is their fried apples. The comments section will now be full of praise and censure for this venerable establishment, but it holds a dear place in my heart. This was the stopping point on the way to my grandparents’, a special treat at the end of vacations, and the site of celebratory meals with the whole family. While I enjoy everything I order there, my continual go-to is the fried apples, and I have yet to leave the restaurant without eating this syrupy treat.

A few years ago, I decided to re-create this dish at home, and after much trial and error, it’s now my fall treat of choice on chilly evenings. Or not so chilly evenings, since it’s decided to stay in the 70s and 80s here into November. Regardless, the smell of cinnamon, apples, and butter has filled my apartment frequently over the past few weeks, and it’s inspired me to branch out a bit in the fall dessert department.

Enter the gingerbread snack cake. This particular dish speaks to me for numerous reasons, mainly because it includes the word “snack.” This clearly means you can eat this cake at any time of day, and that a little whipped cream would make it dessert. However you eat it, this is a superb fall and winter cake, full of rich flavors and tasty whether it’s eaten warm or cool.

This fair-weather Cook’s Illustrated subscriber has amassed many magazines next to her reading chair, so even though I’ve made this recipe many times before, I can’t ever remember which issue contains it. After a lengthy hunt through the magazine basket and three years’ worth of recipes, I finally found the right issue — where I’d last left it, tucked between my Science of Good Cooking book and the knife block on the kitchen counter.

My meal theme of the past few weeks has been “pantry shopping,” and this cake was no exception. I was determined to make something that used only what I had on hand — which is quite a lot — but to no avail. This cake, while not particularly fussy, has a lot of ingredients, and I’d just used up the last of my cocoa powder. Yes, this recipe calls for a small, but vital, amount of cocoa powder, and besides your typical eggs, flour, and sugar, there’s also buttermilk, coffee, pepper, candied ginger, and molasses.

I have no right to grumble about a grocery run, especially one that takes mere minutes, but I so deeply dislike fighting with school traffic in the morning that I’ve come up with many clever ways to avoid such trips. If I wanted this cake, however, a trip was necessary, so off I went, hoping to find a back way through a neighborhood. Having successfully evaded both school-drop-off backups and dangerous left-hand turns — and purchased my cake ingredients — I made it home just in time to start work. The cake creation would have to wait until my lunch break.

My roommate and I decided long ago that using our dishwasher was pointless. We both cook and bake daily using a limited supply of utensils, pans, and bowls, so hand-washing is the only way. I thought, for a while, that we could simply use the empty dishwasher as a drying rack, but that brilliant plan quickly died as mold began sprouting in all its cracks and crevices after a few weeks. I have tried to decrease my kitchenware usage, but to no avail, and this cake scoffs at the idea of a one-bowl dump-and-stir. In fact, it requires three bowls and a stand mixer, a whisk, a spatula, a measuring cup, and most of my teaspoon measures. Not to mention the cutting board (for chopping the ginger), kitchen shears (for dicing the aforementioned ginger), a pour-over for making coffee, and a spoon for the marmalade. Oh yes, this recipe includes marmalade.

So after much stirring, eyeballing, whisking, and beating, I poured the batter into my favorite baking dish (the — now-defunct — Longaberger company made lovely pottery dishes) and popped it into the oven. A few hours later, my students and their siblings graciously indulged my need to have a gingerbread cake photo shoot — even modeling pieces of cake as I hopped around their kitchen with my camera.

Back home that evening, I stepped into the kitchen to wash up my mess from earlier, only to realize it was already done.

Thank you, dear roommate.