How do we sangria at my house? With Manischewitz wine of course! I guess you can call this a Cinco de Mayo – de Mani! While it’s typically our Friday night wine, tonight alongside my tacos (in their fancy egg carton holder) will sit two glasses of sangria made with Manischewitz blackberry wine. If you have never had this wine before, think grape juice with a little kick! It’s a sweet wine and truly the perfect choice as a base for sangria. Concord grape is the most popular and well known flavor of their brand, but the blackberry is my favorite.
I created this refreshing and delicious drink one Friday night when I had the wine over ice. In that instant my Manischewitz (pronounced mani-she-vitz) got a splash of apple brandy, a little fizz, and some fruit thrown in. Friday nights have never been the same at my house since.
We have it on Rosh Hashanah with lots of apples and I throw in a cinnamon stick for some spice. We have it in the summer filled with lots of peaches, berries, or both. Tonight I made it with whatever fruit I had on hand: apples, oranges, lemons, limes and lots of sweet blackberries. Whatever fruit combination you choose will be great. Just keep it simple and no bananas. Save those for your banana bread which I read is the unofficial baked good of Covid – 19. A new banana bread recipe to follow soon. In the meantime, stop baking and go make some sangria! The recipe makes 4 to 6 servings and can easily be cut in half, or doubled. Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!
Now back to my sangria – Olé and Enjoy!
ingredients 1½ cups (½ bottle) Manischewitz blackberry wine (or concord grape is fine) 1 – 8 ounce can Izze blackberry sparkling juice (or other sparkling juice or seltzer) 3 ounces apple brandy ¼ cup orange or pineapple juice 1 medium to large apple cored and cut into ½ inch dice 1 orange cut into wedges or rings 1 small lime sliced into rings blackberries or other fruit on hand lemon wedge to garnish ice to serve (optional)
directions Place all ingredients into a pitcher except for the sparkling juice and place in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour or overnight. When ready to serve, add the sparkling juice and serve over ice or straight up. It’s that easy.
I find the need to repost this recipe every year as is it is a timeless classic. It’s similar to so many out there who claim theirs is the best (but of course, mine is!). What makes mine so different you ask? I don’t add orange juice like most apple cake recipes, instead I prefer using pineapple juice, It gives it a bit of a tropical twist. I also add a dash of almond extract – you know me and my almond obsession! Just these two little changes really set apart from the rest of the pack.
Since I always find myself with a plethora of apples in the fall, this is the perfect cake to make. If you’ve been following my blog, you know I go apple picking every year. I find myself adding apples to almost everything that I bake. There are apple pancakes, my mother’s applesauce, apple pies, crumbles and crisps, and my baked apple doughnuts, among the top contenders. However, if you’re looking for something very special and easy – it’s this apple cake.
“Jarred’s Holiday Apple Cake” has been in my recipe binder for the past 24 years. I know the exact amount of time because it was 24 years ago when I sent out holiday cards to family and friends with a personalized recipe inside the card. It’s not an old family recipe that was handed down to me, it was personalized and printed by the card company and titled “Jarred’s Holiday “Layered Apple Cake” after my then one year old son. Oddly, in all of those 24 years, I never made the cake!
I figured it was something made up for show by the card company. Several years ago, my sister-in-law Barbara was telling me about the delicious apple cake she made and how easy it was. I asked her for the recipe and she laughed outloud and said, it’s Jarred’s apple cake. I was very confused. Had my son become a baker and I didn’t know it?
Apparently, she had been using the recipe from the card for years and loved it! I guess it really worked after all and she was right; it’s terrific and super easy! It also freezes great if you want to make it ahead of time. I don’t think it would make it to the freezer in my house, but it’s good to know! It’s so good I make it year round but to make it extra special around the holidays I decorate the top with thinly sliced apples. You could also cut wedges and place them on top in a circle around the cake. So here it is, straight from the card (with my splash of course) which reads… Best wishes for a New Year filled with all of the ingredients for good health, happiness, and peace. Enjoy!
For the smaller versions, I used 6 one pound aluminum loaf pans. These are nice to give as gifts, or to freeze for a later date.
These could not be cuter! When using the smaller loaf pans, I only made one layer of apples in the center.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup vegetable oil (I use sunflower oil)
4 eggs
1/4 cup pineapple juice (orange would be fine too)
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract (optional but highly recommended)
Now for the apples:
4 to 6 apples* peeled and sliced (yield about 6 to 7 cups)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
5 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Generously grease a 10″ tube pan** and set aside. I sprayed the pan generously with canola oil but you can use butter if you are not keeping it dairy free.
In a small dish, mix 5 teaspoons of sugar with the 2 teaspoons of cinnamon together and set aside. This will be used in the layers over the apples.
Peel and slice the apples, mix with lemon juice to keep the apples white and set aside. I use an apple slicer that cores, peels and spirals the apple into rings then chop it from there. I reserved one apple to decorate the top.
Beat together until smooth the sugar, oil, eggs, orange juice and vanilla. In a separate bowl whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix together just until incorporated.
In the tube pan, pour a layer of batter, then place a layer of apples, and sprinkle about 2 tablespoons of the cinnamon sugar mixture. Repeat layering pattern until all of the batter and apples are used. I ended up with 2 layers of apples and 3 layers of batter. Try to keep the apples in the center of the pan, so they don’t stick to the sides. The original recipe says to top with sugar and cinnamon mixture which is what I did for my smaller cakes. The big cake I topped it with rings of apples and sprinkled it with about 1 to 2 tablespoons of plain white sugar. You can do it either way – both delicious and pretty.
Bake at 350 degrees for 1 1/4 hours to 1 1/2 hours or until a cake tester comes out clean. I like to check it every 30 minutes and turn it 1/2 way through the baking time.
*I used a combination of granny smith, jonathan and golden delicious because that is what I had on hand. Any good baking apple of your choice will work very well in this recipe.
**This recipe will also make 6 miniature loaf pans (1 pound size) or 3 regular size loaf pans (2 pound size). I only made one layer of apples in these versions and they bake in about 40 to 55 minutes.
Is it possible I own over 100 cookbooks? Apparently it is, and I can’t believe I put it out there for everyone to read! Before I sat down to write today, I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about; I just knew I wanted to start a dialog about cookbooks. But what do I want to talk about? Do I want to tell you about my favorites. Do I want to share how and why I got the books I did. Do I want to share a recipe from one of them. Should I be like Julie Powell from the famed Julie and Julia Blog and cook my through one of my books? Where do I begin? Maybe I should start by explaining how my cookbooks multiplied like rabbits!
At some point when I moved to NYC, I became a cookbook collector. Maybe it was all the hours I spent at the Strand Book Store http://www.strandbooks.com/ at the corner of 12th and Broadway. With an iced coffee in hand I could easily spend the day leafing through the art and design books, poetry books, and biography’s, but somehow I always ended up by the cookbook section. My collection grew as the years went by. When I got married, my mother gave me 3 cookbooks plus one she had handwritten just for me with some of her famed recipes. That little cookbook she gave me was the start of something really great.
Over the years, many became gifts from family and friends. My husband was a business consultant and wherever he traveled, he came home with a cookbook. Still not sure what I’m going to do with that Mormon Cookbook from Utah! There was also the cookbook of the month club I joined and a new one would show up every month. Then I found Kitchen Arts and Letters http://kitchenartsandletters.com/bookstore/ a bookstore which sells only cookbooks! Can you hear the ethereal music playing in the background? I can! Lucky for me, Columbus has it’s own special book store called The Book Loft http://www.bookloft.com/ It has 32 rooms of books, three of them containing cookbooks!
Over the years I realized I enjoy reading cookbooks the same way other people read novels. Right now the books on my nightstand are Modern Jewish Cooking by Leah Koenig, Cookie Love by Mindy Segal, Martha Stewart’s Appetizers and Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston. Since I counted over 100 cookbooks on my bookcase, that Feng Shui book is looking like a must read and will remain on the top of the stack!
Do I have a favorite? Well I’ll have to channel my mother here and say no, I have 10 fingers and I love them all the same! The same can be said for my collection. They each have a reason for taking their place on my shelf. Whether it’s the style of cooking, a chef I like, history, a particular region, or technique; they all have a place in my heart. I do have a soft spot for any cookbook with beautiful photography. Some are so stunning, they warrant a special place on my coffee table! I treasure the ones I have from my mother and mother-in-law with their handwritten notes and newspaper clippings of recipes used as place markers. Both great cooks and bakers who never needed a cookbook but, like me, enjoyed reading them cover to cover like a novel.
This past winter, I signed up to be part of a cookbook swap. I guess I thought I needed yet another cookbook! It was so much fun to get a cookbook in the mail and if you’re keeping track, this book makes the count 101! I’ll share more about the swap in another post. In the meantime…
Tell me about your favorite cookbooks so we can start our own cookbook of the month club! We can call it What are you “Reating” unless you think that’s way too corny! I think it could be fun to find out what cookbooks you, my fabulous readers are using. Until then, happy cooking… and sweet baking.
