October Micro Bake Off: Apple Crumb Cake

Why you should try apple cake's popular, crumb-filled cousin

When I was researching for the apple cake bake off, it quickly became apparent that apple cake is no simple category.

There’s French apple cake, upside down apple cake, Russian sharlotka, German apple cake and Irish apple cake, just to name a few. And—most appealing to most of you—apple crumb cake (or apple coffee cake).

For consistency, I culled the bake off recipes to more Jewish/American style apple cakes, but I kept apple crumb cake in my back pocket for a follow up. While I do think apple crumb cake could warrant its own full bake off (perhaps next fall), I thought it could be a fun mini comparison and follow up while the full apple cake bake off is still fresh.

So let’s dive into the comparison of three popular apple crumb cake recipes!

A quick interruption to note that one of these recipe developers, Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen, has been encouraging people to donate to World Central Kitchen. This organization is currently helping feed families impacted by conflict in Gaza, Israel, Egypt and Lebanon. I wanted to bring it to your attention in case you were looking for ways to lend a hand.

Recipe Overviews

Smitten Kitchen

At least among my audience, this is THE apple crumb cake recipe. Many of you wrote in saying that you’ve made it/loved it/wanted to try it, and I’ve also had it bookmarked to try since its publication! With a relatively simple ingredient list and assembly instructions, this was a quick cake to throw together.

Recipe characteristics include:

• Cake uses creamed butter and sour cream

• Crumb is made with melted butter, whisked together

• Apple wedges are tossed with lemon and spices and layered into the batter

• ~An hour bake time at 325

Pies & Tacos

This recipe mainly differs from Smitten Kitchen in that Camila cuts softened butter into the streusel instead of using melted butter. While this seemed slightly fussier, I was curious how the technique would differ. This cake also uses buttermilk instead of sour cream like the other two, and the overall cake volume is about 1.5x more than Smitten Kitchen (but it uses less apple). Note: I did omit the cinnamon glaze for consistency.

Recipe characteristics include:

• Cake uses creamed butter and buttermilk

• Crumb is made with softened butter cut into dry ingredients

• 3/8” chopped apples are tossed with spices and layered into the batter

• ~An hour bake time at 325

Rose Levy Beranbaum

I nearly eliminated Rose’s apple-cinnamon crumb coffee cake from this test because it uses walnuts, which tends to throw off recipe ratings because nuts are so divisive. The crumb topping is composed of walnuts, sugar, melted butter, flour and spices ground in a food processor. However, this had the most unique cake base of all the recipes I compared with a reverse-creamed cake. It also uses the unusual technique of adding the crumb partway through the cake’s bake time to keep the crumb from sinking. Ultimately, I was curious about all of these components together!

Recipe characteristics include:

• Cake uses the reverse creaming method + sour cream

• Crumbs made in a food processor with lots of walnuts and melted butter

• Just 1 small, thinly sliced apple (the smallest quantity of apples among the recipes), get tossed in lemon juice and layered into the batter

• The crumb is added partway through the ~hour long bake time to keep the crumb from sinking too far into the cake batter

Note: I used Granny Smith apples for all of these recipes.

After distributing the crumb cakes to 17 different tasters, here were the results

THIRD PLACE