Apple Sharlotka

While mad science is the Gargoyle's favorite relationship with food, sometimes the occasion calls for something easy and familiar.

A staple of Russian home dessert vocabulary is an apple cake known as sharlotka, nicknamed inexplicably after a French dessert, the charlotte, with which it has absolutely nothing in common. Whereas a charlotte is a pudding of cake or cookie base with custard, a sharlotka is a baked cake. And one easy enough to produce to be a go-to with which even lazy bakers can impress.

This is a Gargoyle favorite to take to parties, and often the recipe gets doubled so that two of these get baked at once, one to share and the other to enjoy at home.

Oh by the way. If you're one of those purists who thinks that baking is science, get thee to a French patisserie blog. Here we believe that a cookie whose ingredients are not precise is simply a different cookie. (And also we mostly don't make things that are legit that fiddly and particular.)

The most effortful part of sharlotka is peeling and chopping the apples. It's possible to omit the peeling, but the texture is better without the skins. Chopping is, alas, mandatory. Cubing is fairly common, but the Gargoyle prefers to use one of those apple slicer gadgets that cores the apple and produces eight slices, and then further dismantle each slice into thinner ones.

To make about a 9" cake pan:

An apple cake

• 2-ish apples, 3-ish if small, 4-ish if you want it mega fruity. The family recipe said "the more the better".

• Cinnamon if you like

• 1 cup flour

• 3 eggs. (Some say 2, but we like it more eggy here. Sometimes we use 4.)

• 1 cup sugar

• a pinch of salt

• vanilla if you like

• oldschool leavening: 1 tsp baking soda & 1 tsp white vinegar

• neutral oil for the pan

For a moment of mad science let's talk about the soda-and-vinegar thing. The purported reason is to make the dough lighter and fluffier.

The Way of the Ancestors is thus:

• Put a teaspoon of baking soda into a tablespoon. (Of habit one uses an actual large soup spoon, not a measure, cuz that's how it was done Back In The Old Country where we didn't have official measures.)

• Poke a volcano hole in the middle of it.

• Carefully pour white vinegar into a teaspoon.

• Holding the baking soda tablespoon over the batter pour the vinegar teaspoon into the volcano.

• Watch it fizzle for no more than the briefest moment, drop it in quickly, and stir in with that same tablespoon.

Modern experts say this is pointless because the gas dissipates before it even hits the dough and it's better to use other leavening agents. Or to add the soda to the dry ingredients and a tastier acidic liquid like lemon juice or yogurt to the wet ingredients and they'll do their thing when combined. (Except this cake doesn't do the pour wets into dries methodology, so nevermind on that one.) Or you could probably just use baking powder. But you gotta admit, making a tiny volcano for your cake is kind of fun.

1. Preheat the oven to 350

2. Grease the pan. Or line with parchment if you want to and grease that.

3. Peel and smallify the apples.

4. Throw all the apples into the pan, and spread more or less evenly. If the pile is not taller than the pan, you're ok. Sprinkle with cinnamon or cinnamon and sugar if you want to.

5. In a bowl beat the eggs. (It will probably rise more and be more airy if this is done with a mixer until the eggs do the expandy thing, or even a blender, but if tallness is not an aspiration, a whisk is just fine, and so is beating until eggs are just well blended. Gargoyle actually likes it a little denser.)

6. Add the sugar. Whisk some more until the sugar can no longer be individually identified in the goo.

7. Gradually incorporate the flour, whisking until it too loses all identity.

8. Drop in a pinch of salt - it just makes other flavors more themselves.

9. Some people also add vanilla.

10. Do the leavening thing as described above. Or do not. (There is no try.)

11. Glop the batter over the fruit, spreading it with a spatula or that spoon you just had in your hand for more or less even coverage

12. Bake for at least 30 mins before poking with a toothpick and hoping it comes out clean. If it doesn't, bake some more, in 10 minutes test again, repeat as needed.

13. One hears some people put confectioner's sugar on top. To the Gargoyle it's a feature that the sweetness is not overwhelming.

Verdict: short of getting the doneness really, really wrong it's pretty much impossible to mess up.

Also goes great with ice cream.