Easy Apple Crumble Cake (German Krummeltorte)
If you’re very much not an experienced baker, this is the recipe for you – the recipe for this easy apple crumble cake truly couldn’t be more forgiving. If you didn’t mix the ingredients particularly well? Ehh, it doesn’t matter. Cooked the apples a little too long, and they’ve gone a bit mushy? Never mind! It will still be delicious. Truly, I am not a master baker my any means, but I’ve made this easy cake loads of times now, and it always comes out perfectly.
You might also like: Caramel Pear Crumble Cake; Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter Pudding; No Churn Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream.
This apple cake has three main layers:
- a dense, cakey base
- a layer of soft and sweet spiced apples
- an extra sugary, crumbly layer on top
And the best part? The same mixture of ingredients is used for both the top and bottom layers! I know, it’s like magic.
👵🏻 Old Family Recipe
This easy apple crumble cake is actually a recipe from my late Granny’s old handwritten recipe book (which you may have seen before if you’ve read my vegetable cobbler recipe!). It’s such a special recipe book, stuffed with random recipes that my Granny got from friends, or copied out of various magazines. It’s a wonderful hodge podge.
In the book, my Granny called this recipe ‘German Krummeltorte’, but after a bit of Googling, I can’t actually find much evidence that Krummeltorte exists… if you’re German, please do let me know if you’ve heard of it before!
Regardless, it is a very, very tasty cake, and I just love how easy it is to make. I have actually changed the recipe just a little from her original, mostly just to simplify it (I have neither the time nor the inclination to use two different kinds of flour and two different kinds of sugar!), but the end result still turns out just beautifully.
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🥗 Ingredients and Substitutions
Here’s what you’ll need to make this easy apple cake recipe. See the printable recipe card below for detailed ingredient quantities.
- cooking apples (e.g. Bramley apples) – these are not the sort of apple you’d usually want to eat raw (they’re a bit too sharp), but they cook up beautifully, holding their shape instead of turning mushy like some other apples do. If you can’t find specific cooking apples, just use what you can find.
- self-raising flour
- sugar – any kind of white sugar will be fine, e.g. caster sugar or granulated sugar
- egg
- butter (unsalted)
- ground cinnamon
🔪 Equipment
My favourite kind of cake pan is definitely a loose bottomed springform cake tin. It makes it so easy to get the cake out of the tin when it’s cooked – just run a knife around the edges to make sure it’s not stuck to the sides, then undo the clip, and push the entire cake up out of the pan. It couldn’t be easier!
Here’s a perfect one on Amazon, with great reviews:
🖨️ Printable Instructions
Easy Apple Crumble Cake
If you’ve cooked this recipe, don’t forget to leave a star rating!
Print Pin Comment(if you suffer from allergies, please double check all ingredients before eating)
Ingredients
- 680 g (~ 1 1/2 lb / ~ 2 large) cooking apples
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (or nutmeg)
- 100 g (~ 3 1/2 oz) unsalted butter (plus a bit more for greasing the tin)
- 250 g (~ 1 2/3 cups) self-raising flour
- 200 g (~ 1 cup) granulated or caster sugar
- 1 egg
Instructions
- Peel and core the apples, and cut them into thin slices.
- Add the sliced apples to a pan with the cinnamon and a quarter of the sugar, and cook over a low heat for 5 minutes, mixing regularly, until slightly soft. Set aside.
- In a bowl, use clean hands to rub the butter and the flour together using your fingertips. The mixture should end up crumbly, like breadcrumbs. Don’t worry if some lumps remain – it doesn’t need to be perfect.
- Add most of the remaining sugar (just hold a little back for topping), and crack in the egg. Mix well with a fork.
- Heat the oven to 190°C (Gas Mark 5 / 375°F). Thoroughly grease a spring-form cake tin measuring around 8 inches – I usually just hold a block of butter and rub it all over the tin.
- Add around two-thirds of the cake mixture into the cake tin, and press it firmly into the tin using your knuckles or fingertips.
- Add the stewed apples, and spread them out into a fairly flat layer.
- Then, sprinkle the remaining cake mixture on top, along with any remaining sugar.
- Bake for around 40 minutes, or until golden brown. To serve warm, leave to stand for a few minutes, and then release from the spring-form pan. To serve cold, leave it to cool in the tin and then remove and slice.
- Serve with cream, ice cream or custard, if desired.
Nutrition
Nutritional information is approximate, and will depend on your exact ingredients. Please calculate your own nutritional values if you require accuracy for health reasons.
💭 Recipe FAQs
This easy apple cake is great served warm or cold, so if you like, you could fully cook the cake, and then serve it cold later. Alternatively, you could allow the apple mixture to cool fully, assemble the cake, and then store it in the fridge until you’re ready to bake and serve.
I love this apple cake served with a drizzle of cream, but custard or ice cream would also work well (especially if the cake is warm!).
I have made this so many times, but I always find that the base does not cook through well enough, always seems a bit stodgy. I don’t put too much apple moisture in, I think maybe just covering the base is enough to keep it from cooking well enough. I will try baking the base first I think. But utterly delicious anyway, even if stodgy at times.
Thanks for the feedback Helen! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it enough to keep making it anyway – I personally like a bit of stodge sometimes :D
Have just made this, and it is utterly delicious. I did put a bit of caramel sauce in with the apples, and we have agreed that this made it a bit too sweet, so next time, we’ll leave it out. I have 3 – well, 2 now – boxes of prepared cooking apples in the freezer (gift from my mother or brother, not sure which), and this is a lovely way of eating them.
However, I have a feeling my younger grandson would want me to call it gruffalo crumble…..
Yay I’m really glad you like this recipe! My Granny was a clever lady. Why Gruffalo crumble?!
He loves that poem:
“And now my tummy’s beginning to rumble,
And my favourite food is gruffalo crumble!” So he has been asking for gruffalo crumble for weeks – he can help me make it next time I cook with the boys, if he hasn’t already been helping his mother make it.
Ah ok haha! Sounds good – this would be such an easy recipe to cook with kids :)
How many apples 5 or 6? I also don’t have any demerara sugar on hand. Can I just use cane sugar?
I’m sure any sort of sugar would work fine :) I don’t know the exact number of apples I used, but 5 or 6 sounds about right! The exact number doesn’t matter really, it just depends how apple-y you’d like it to be!
I made this recipe this afternoon. The apples on our little tiny tree in the garden are beginning to ripen, still a bit hard but totally edible. And I’d just bought some apples from the shop because I didn’t think our own were ready yet. Turns out I’d been testing them wrong. Oh well. Result, lots of apples at my disposal. This cake seemed the obvious solution, especially since I already had all the things.
I served mine with a bit of whipped cream, foolishly whipping up the whole quarter liter carton, so now I may have to bake a second cake to get all that whipped cream used up… Oh damn! ;)
I’m considering adding nuts to it, though. Either hazelnut or walnut, although I’m leaning mostly towards hazelnuts. I’m sort of imagining it finely chopped and mixed with the demerara sugar on top, or possibly roughly chopped, toasted and mixed with the apple. It’s worth the experiment, I feel.
Glad you liked it! :) Nuts would be a fab addition, I’d go for walnuts myself, but then I’m not really a fan of hazelnuts. Enjoy the rest of it! :D