Apple-Ginger Cake

101 Cookbooks is really, really great. I, The Wife, have been dying to make some apple bread or apple muffins and have been acting like this is actually a possibility on weekday mornings when I have to be at work at 7:45 at the latest. And isn't it always the breakfast we can't ever seem to have that seems like the only one that would ever be ideal? I always imagine myself making things like this apple cake and getting to linger over the op-eds and a couple of warm pieces of fruit-and-nut bread straight out of the oven, or picking up some dark chocolate croissants at La Baguette, or getting to have two cups of cafe au lait instead of one gulped down while finding something, anything appropriate to wear to my job... 

So Saturday rolls around, and I finally have some time to make Heidi's Unfussy Apple Cake. (I think poring over her pictures of this on 101 Cookbooks this week is why I began to have this craving in the first place!) As usual, I did change a couple of things for taste as well as necessity. I added in the sugar from a bag of crystallized ginger and minced five pieces of it to include in the flour mix. I also sprinkled cinnamon and ground ginger on top of the cake along with turbinado sugar. We have not been to the grocery as often as usual lately because it has been enough at this point just to make it through the day and semi-enjoy a few things about it, so we've gotten pretty lax about having a stocked fridge and a neat house and really have had to focus on the basics. We also did not have buttermilk, so I used that trick of adding vinegar to milk and waiting a few minutes to simulate it. 

I love that you are supposed to leave the peels on the apples for this recipe: tres cute. The true test of whether a dessert is any good is if it is gone in a day, and this one passed that test. I felt like a circa-1954 housewife fetching water and coffee for Kelly and TCV once they came back from their 8-miler today as they commented upon how good the kitchen smelled. It was a great breakfast with them. 

Oddly enough, I remembered this morning that I was getting pumpkin bread out of the oven 3 weeks ago when I got the news about Suzanne. I just really haven't been in a dessert-making mood, I suppose, and haven't baked or cooked or put together a thing since then. Suzanne absolutely loved every dessert I created and made a point to ask me to be responsible for dessert when we did our family stuff. I think this, one of my only talents in the kitchen, reminded her of her mom, Juanita, who made the best checkerboard cakes and fried pies in the South.