Take One Apple . . .

Yeppers, that's all it takes -- just one apple to make two of those little mini-cakes. You don't even have to peel the apple if you don't want to (I didn't.) but you do need to grate it up. Or you could use some of that zucchini that seems to be everywhere this time of year -- or a couple of carrots or whatever. Just so you get about a cup of juicy grated stuff. I found the recipe on the Taste of Home web site but I've messed with it a bit so I'll show you what I did here and you can click on the link to see what the author of the original recipe did, okay?

Before we get to the recipe, I need to mention something about eggs. I never did buy into the booga-booga stuff about cholesterol and eggs. Sure, they have cholesterol but, as was pointed out in Prevention magazine way back in the '70s, they also have plenty of lecithin, which emulsifies the cholesterol and fat. Also, the eggs have more of the good cholesterol than the bad . . . and dietary cholesterol is no longer considered such a culprit anyway. Here's a pretty good short article on the subject. I mention this to explain why I added the yolk to the lemon sauce even though it wasn't mentioned in the original recipe. That said, everybody's body works different so you have to march to your drummer, not mine.

Okay, here we go with the little cutie-pie apple cakes with lemon sauce. The batter will be divided up between a couple of small ramekins -- I used two 12-ounce Pyrex dishes that worked fine. I think one could probably even make about 4 cupcakes with this amount of batter.

MINI-APPLE CAKES

2 tablespoons shortening or butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg white
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup shredded apple
1/4 cup chopped pecans
Mix fat and sugar together until crumbly. Add egg white and vanilla and mix well. Add dry ingredients and mix well again. Batter will be very stiff. Fold in apple and nuts. The moisture in the shredded apple will loosen up the batter a little. Spoon into greased 8- or 10-ounce baking containers. Bake at 325 degrees fairy height for 30 minutes.

If you compare pictures, you see my cake came out a darker brown than the other one. I think that's because I baked mine in the countertop roasting oven and it took twice as long because there is no way the little oven can maintain the kind of heat you get in the big one. No problem. The cakes were just right when I took them out. Nice and moist and nummy. And here's the lemon sauce, which takes only a couple or three minutes in the microwave:

QUICKIE LEMON SAUCE

3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon corn starch
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, cold, cubed

Mix sugar, corn starch and lemon juice together and microwave on high for 1 minute. Whisk, then add a couple spoonfuls of the lemon mixture to the egg yolk and whisk it in to temper the egg. Then whisk the egg mixture back into the lemon mixture and microwave for another minute. Add the little cubes of cold butter and whisk until the butter is melted. If the sauce looks thick enough then, you're done. If not, another minute won't hurt.

In the photo above, you can see the sauce got thicker as it cooled. When I get ready to eat that cake, I'll slip the sauce in the microwave for maybe 30 seconds to make it a bit easier to pour over the cake. Nom, nom, nom!

And it only took one apple . . .