piece of apple cake close up

Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake

Have your cake & eat it too! This cake is almost healthy! Delicious recipe for Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake!

Really? Do we really, truly need a reason to celebrate when you’re baking a cake called, “Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake?” The name alone just smacks of healthy-ishness.

I say, “No.” I say I might even have the leftover slice (if there is one) for breakfast. So even though we don’t NEED a reason to bake this cake, I’m hoping that the fact we broke ground on our new home is enough reason to take a fall drive over to the orchard and buy a peck of apples in-season when their flavor is incomparable to apples any other time of the year.

But surely a whole grain cake is gonna taste awful… Dry, crunchy, and flavorless, right? Maybe a little extra glaze over the top just in case?

WRONG!

Harvest Apple Butter Cake makes me want to shun all other cake recipes for being boring and cloyingly sweet fluff. The whole grains lend a heartiness and complexity of flavor that are exciting in their rustic, perhaps even homegrown, simplicity. It truly is my favorite cake to serve this time of year!

Have your cake & eat it too! This cake is almost healthy! Delicious recipe for Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake!

Baking a Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake

This cake is baked just like any other traditional cake. The butter and sugar are creamed together… the dry ingredients are whisked in another bowl… and then added in turns with the wet ingredients to the sugar mix. Just when you’re fighting the urge to swipe the bowl for a sample, that’s when you want to stir in the extras, apple chunks and walnuts. (Though our new homestead has several stands of mature hickory trees so you can bet your sweet bippy I’ll be making this with hazelnuts just as soon as I have the tools to harvest the nuts properly.)

Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake

While I haven’t shared my recipe for slow cooker Apple Butter yet, I have shared plenty of other incredibly delicious homemade cake recipes that feature homegrown and seasonal ingredients in my little cookbook Cake Stand. These are the tried and true recipes we are using in our home to celebrate the big (and little) blessings in our lives. They are our favorites and every time we (and by “we” I probably mean Hannah who can be found doing most of the baking these days) try a new recipe we’re like, “Why didn’t we just stick to the one we already know is good? (In fact, this just happened this weekend when she made a Chocolate & Vanilla Swirl Pound Cake. The Vanilla part was good but the chocolate tasted boring. We all ended up buttering our pound cake!)

You can get yourself a copy of Cake Stand in our Homesteader’s Shop today so be sure to check it out!

Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake

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piece of apple cake close up

Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake

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Ingredients

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Apple Butter Cake

  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 1 ½ cups sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 Tablespoon vanilla
  • 1 ¼ cups cornmeal 
  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ teaspoon allspice
  • 1 cup spiced apple butter
  • ¼ cup milk
  • 2 apples, chopped
  • ¾ cup pecans, chopped

Vanilla Butter Glaze 

  • 1 ⅓ cups powdered sugar, sifted
  • ¼ cup butter, softened
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • ¼ cup milk

Instructions

Apple Butter Cake

  • Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a tube pan with some soft butter. 
  • In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the butter and sugar until they are light and fluffy. 
  • Scrape the bowl and add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition, and then beat in the vanilla. 
  • In a small bowl, whisk the cornmeal, wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, and allspice together.
  • In another small bowl stir the milk into the apple butter. 
  • Add the dry ingredients, alternating with the apple butter. Begin and end with the flour. 
  • Stir in the chopped apples and pecans then pour the batter into the cake pan. 
  • Bake the cake for 45-55 minutes, testing for doneness, and cool the cake for 10 minutes before inverting it to cool completely. 
  • Glaze with Vanilla Butter Glaze.

Vanilla Butter Glaze

  • Whisk all of the ingredients together, adjusting the powdered sugar and milk amount until the glaze is thick enough so as not be runny, yet still thin enough to drizzle. 

Original Recipe Credit: King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking

Have your cake & eat it too! This cake is almost healthy! Delicious recipe for Whole Grain Harvest Apple Butter Cake!

Enjoy!

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