Apple Custard Cake | New Vintage Cooking
Re-creating a recipe from memory…when the memory isn’t yours.
When my friend Meredith was battling cancer, she asked for just one favor: that I bake an apple custard cake her mother, Thelma, had made every autumn in the small Quincy, Massachusetts, apartment where she raised seven children. I had recently published a book on apples but had no custard cakes in my repertoire, and Meredith didn’t have the original recipe. Luckily, a bit of Googling revealed some promising leads.
The fact that Meredith lived in San Francisco, where we had once been neighbors, was a small inconvenience: My husband had an upcoming trip there and was happy to act as courier. So I packed up my best attempt at apple custard cake, and she called to thank me when it arrived. Yet something in her voice said it wasn’t quite what she had been craving. It was good, but it didn’t bring the memory back to life.
Since that first version five years ago, I’ve circled back to the custard cake, trying to achieve the exact right mix of custardy top and tender interior. With this recipe, I finally got what I was looking for. And even if it still isn’t identical to her mother’s, I send it out to Meredith, now cancer-free, with love.
GET THE RECIPE: Apple Custard Cake
Amy Traverso
Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee magazine and co-host of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with WGBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.
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