The saga of the apple streusel cake

**Bonus Christmas content alert that isn’t really Christmas content but there is a Santa emoji on the main picture so it still counts!**

On a whim one day, when looking through my Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book (which has been, and will be, featured a lot during my Christmas content), I stumbled across a recipe for apple streusel cake.

I think this was one of those days where I wanted to make a cake to take to work, but I wanted something quite straightforward that wouldn’t take hours and didn’t need decorating.

I liked it because it looked a bit like apple crumble, and I don’t think you can go wrong with apple crumble.

At about the same time, one of my colleagues mentioned that her boyfriend’s granddad had given her a load of apples. Blah blah blah, I ended up making a cake with the apples she had. Look, I took a picture of them, only to highlight the enormous one in the middle:

Here is a picture of the apple on it, in concentric circles (sort of)!

Then you put your crumble topping on, which has cinnamon and all that good stuff in it, and it comes out looking a bit like this:

I took it to work, and my colleagues in my team loved it.

I got requests to make it again, I got asked for the recipe. It was well received and people told me it was the best cake I’d ever made (although, not to blow my own trumpet, they say this quite regularly).

It cemented itself as a favourite amongst my team, and so I made it again and to prove that, here’s a picture of it on a different plate! And another picture of some custard on it!

I’ll be honest, this was so long ago that I can’t remember where the custard came from. Maybe someone brought it in the second time round? This might have been before we had the microwave taken out of our office. It was a controversial time – someone microwaved a fish pie with egg in it, and everyone hit the roof and the microwave was never seen again.

Anyway, I made these cakes approximately 700 years ago. These photos have been on my camera roll since October 2017. So why am I publishing this blog post now?

WELL.

One of my other favourite teams at work were asking me to make them a cake. Because it’s easy, and it’s a favourite of my team, I thought ‘what could go wrong!’ and excitedly set about making this apple cake for them.

I took them the cake on a Thursday. The following Tuesday, I went into their office to collect my cake tin.

It was heavy when I picked it up. I was confused. What’s this about?

I opened it.

This was what I saw:

This, friends of the blog, IS OVER HALF A CAKE THAT HADN’T BEEN EATEN.

Half a cake. Half a cake, that has had very positive reviews, remained in the tin after five days in an office full of people. HALF A CAKE.

I felt very despondent indeed.

So I decided to make the cake for my office for the third time, to conduct an experiment – #cakescience returns to the blog!

Here’s a picture of the cake, on yet again another plate to prove it’s different, that I took into my office.

To be fair it doesn’t look great – I’m not sure what happened but I think I was having an ‘off’ night. I made a carrot cake the same evening and it sank in the middle 🙁 Anyway, I have photographed our progress throughout the day:

Four hours is how long it took us to get through the cake. And I know it’s still a banging cake because I overheard someone say: “I haven’t even finished this bit yet and I want more.”

And to the other team who didn’t eat the flipping cake: I’m not angry. I’m just very disappointed!