Oops, I did it again: a sweet toffee apple cake with tart berries

There are at least three more apple cake recipes I want to share with you, which will bring the apple cake total on this blog to 6. Considering that I visit my parents every weekend and hardly ever manage to leave without yet another bag full of home-grown apples, I'll be baking apple cakes until ... well, until there's a new crop of apples next summer.

I might need to create a separate category for apple cakes on my blog recipe index:)

Anyway - here's another lovely apple cake. You can use shop-bought shortcrust pastry, or your favourite pate brisee recipe. The cake is filled with apples and cranberries and covered with a mixture of soft brown sugar, potato starch and butter, which melt into a delicious toffee-ish sauce. I've got a supply of cranberries in my freezer, picked by yours truly back in September alongside my latest mushroom gathering trip in September. If you haven't got any cranberries, then use lingonberries or just apples, although the tartness that the berries yield goes well with the toffee that miraculously appears on the cake.

Toffee apple cake with cranberries
(Karamelline õunakook jõhvikatega)
Serves 6


[In the oven, waiting to be baked. Click on the photo to enlarge.]

Pastry:
300 ml plain flour
100 grams cold butter
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp cold water

Filling:
3-4 large apples, sliced
a handful or two of small cranberries
100 ml soft dark brown sugar
1 Tbsp potato starch/potato flour
50 grams butter

Mix flour, sugar and butter in a bowl, and cut into small crumbs using a knife. Add the water and quickly bring together into a ball. Press the dough onto the bottom and sides of a cake tin, and put into fridge or freezer while you prepare the filling.
Wash, peel (unless you use home-grown apples) and core the apples, then cut into thick slices.
Mix soft brown sugar with potato starch.
Take the prepared cake crust out of the oven, cover with apple slices and scatter cranberries on top.
Sprinkle the sugar mixture on top and finally lie small slices of butter onto the cake filling (it's the mixture of melted butter and soft brown sugar that results in a toffee-ish sauce on the cake, so be generous with both).
Bake at 200C for 25-30 minutes, until the cake is lovely golden brown on top.
Sprinkle with icing sugar (optional) and serve.

Other apple cakes @ Nami-nami:
Grated apple cheesecake
Canadian apple cake
Simple apple traybake

UPDATE
22.1.2007: Gracianne of Un dimance a la Campagne tried this cake and liked it.
05.2.2007: Dagmar of A Cat in the Kitchen liked it too:)