I find that every enthusiastic home cook or baker eventually becomes known among their acquaintance for a certain dish or bake. It’s that one thing that they make better than anyone else, that they make consistently well, and that is always a crowd pleaser.

For me, that’s Spice Apple Cake. I picked up the recipe to this delicious cake back in the late 1990s. In the early years of my trying to figure out my adult relationship with my parents, I invited my mother to go holiday shopping with me at Liberty Village, a now-defunct outdoor outlet mall in Flemington, NJ. Liberty Village was famous for going all-out decorating for the holidays, so the plan was to go and browse and just have a nice day out. One of the shops we went to had cartons of powdered mulling spice and a A5 photocopied sheet of recipes that they were handing out. I bought a carton of the spice and took one of the recipe sheets.

I have only made one of the recipes on the sheet, even all of these years later, but it has been a hit. My Spice Apple Cake is well-known and frequently requested amongst my family and friends. It’s a rustic cake, not much to look at, but it’s probably the most consistently delicious bake I make. Over the years, the brand on the spices has changed from Raven’s Spice to Aspen Mulling Spices, and I’ve had some years of difficulty in finding it, but all hail the internet – it’s easily gotten now.

And since we’re into autumn now (at least in my head, if not yet in reality,) and since apples are in season, I’ve been making these delicious cakes again. They’re still amazing. The recipe is duplicated below, just as it was written on the sheet I got all those years ago.