Friday Food #22: Apple or Peach Cake-Thing

I found this recipe in a Food and Wine magazine years ago on an airplane. And, yes, I can now confess that I removed said magazine from the plane and brought it home. There were several good recipes in the magazine, as I recall...baked pastas and homey fruit desserts were the big draw. I still have the magazine on my cookbook shelf, plastic airline-cover and all.

So I've been making this dessert for years, but I still can't call it "quick apple cake," which is what Food and Wine called it. It's really not a cake, but rather something like a cobbler with a cake topping. Is there a name for that? I also like it just as much with peaches as with apples, if not more...and I like it with more fruit than the original recipe called for. You can be creative with it, too: mix apples with cranberries in the fall, peaches with strawberries in the summer, whatever you like. It's hard to go wrong, frankly, with this much fruit and this much butter.

It's really too hot to bake right now, but I did make this one at the beach, and it turned out great. Here's how you do it.

Cut up six apples or so into a casserole dish (or, if you want a higher cake-to-apple ratio, cut three apples into a pie dish). The original recipe says to butter the dish but I've learned that's not really necessary. If you're using peaches, use at least six, more if your casserole dish has room. You are looking to get the fruit up to the top of the dish, more or less, but you don't need to heap it up.

Toss the fruit slices with lemon juics (about one tbl), sugar (one tsp) and cinnamon (2 tsp).

Melt 1 1/2 sticks of butter. Stir into the melted butter 3/4 cu sugar, 2 beaten eggs, and 1 cu flour. Pour the batter over the fruit. Sprinkle some sugar (and cinnamon, if you like) over the batter. Bake at 350 for 50 minutes (pie dish) to 65 minutes (casserole dish)--or until the top looks golden and delicious. You can serve this hot, at room temperature, or cold, with ice cream or whipped cream or nothing at all. As with cobbler, leftovers are good for breakfast, but don't count on them if your family is anything like mine.