Raw Apple Cake

Yeah, I was pretty intrigued by this recipe's name, too.  Raw apple cake.  Raw apple cake?  What was raw?  The apples?  The cake?  How can you have a raw cake?  Or, conversely, how can you put raw apples into a cooked cake?  Mom had pinned and requested the apple cake after an apple-picking trip, so I was curious enough about these questions to give it a try.

Well now that I've made the recipe, I've figured out the raw part, and it's a bit misleading.  Nothing is raw. The apples are cooked into the cake, so they're both cooked.  But the apples aren't peeled before they're cut up and tossed into the batter.  So I think that's what they meant by raw: the skin is still on them.  I know, not quite what I was expecting either.  And my mother's only complaint was that she didn't really care for the apple skin bites, so if I made the cake again, I'd probably peel the apples, and there goes the "raw" part of the name.

The cake itself was okay.  It didn't call for any cinnamon, which I thought was weird, but the cake was still really moist and had a lot of apple taste.  I didn't have any myself, but only about half of it went before we tossed the rest, so it wasn't a huge hit over here either.  So, on to my next apple recipe (I've since made a pie that was much better received!).  What's your favorite way to bake with apples?

Recipe:

raw apple cake
from StoneGable
yield 1 bundt cake or 2 loaves

Ingredients:
3 cups apples, cored, skin on and cut into small pieces
3 cups flour
2 cups white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup walnuts, chopped

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 325 degrees.  In a large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, salt and baking soda.

2) In another medium bowl, whisk together the oil, eggs, and vanilla.  Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and mix by hand.  This batter will be very stiff, like cookie dough.

3) Add the apples and walnuts and mix in.  Spray a bundt pan or 2 loaf pans with cooking spray.  Dump the batter into the pans.  Cook for 1 hour.  Test the center to see that it is fully cooked.  Let the cake cool and then turn out onto a wire rack.