crumb cake

The other day, as we were finishing lunch with a refreshing, palate cleansing bowl of applesauce, the Little Dude started to talk about recipes. As you know, he's very interested in food and baking lately. If he likes some kind of food, he enjoys ruminating on what other kinds of food that kind of food could be made into. So as he finished his applesauce, he suggested that it was such good applesauce, we should put it in a cake and it would be called "applesauce cake". It would have butter and sugar and flour and applesauce and crackers in it, he told me. 

Well, why not. 

I got out my trusty old Joy of Cooking, and looked up a recipe for applesauce cake. Since it was the weekend and we had Hubs around he whisked the baby away for some playtime, making it much easier than usual to fit a little baking in after lunch, but before nap time. We measured and sifted and stired and poured and all the other actions that make baking so much fun for a three and a half year old. We were just about to mix the wet stuff with the dry stuff when L.D. said "Wait, we forgot the crackers!" I showed him the recipe in the book and said that actually, it said we didn't need to have crackers. "But its and applesauce cracker cake! We hafta put crackers it it!" hm. How bad could that be? So, in the spirit of egalitarian parenting and creative freedom I got out the mortar and pestel for him, and handed him three cornbread crackers, and let him go to town. He gleefully ground them all up and dumped them in with the flour. "This will be delicious!" he told me. 

And he was right. It was a lovely cake, moist and sweet without being too sugary. I suggested we make some frosting, but he was having none of it. How about a little icing sugar to sprinkle over the top. Nope, he just wanted "plain cake". Alright then. So we set the table and invited GranGran over to join us for some tea and the inaugural tasting of the Applesauce Cracker Cake.

And it was very good indeed. 

Comments

[Marcia Van Drunen]

marvelous. :)

[Brandy]

That's so sweet. My daughter asks me almost daily if we can "make recipes". I love baking with little ones :)