Apricot crumble cake nothing like you’d expect: the apricots are soft dried ones, the crumble barely sweet and the cake is baked in a loaf tin.
When you hear ‘apricot crumble cake’ your thoughts go to summer, luscious fresh apricots loaded on a round cake base and baked under a sweet blanket of crispy and aromatic crumble. And that is indeed a wondrous dessert except it is not this one.
This is a winter version of a crumble cake. The apricots are dried and the cake is loaf-shaped. It’s basically a standard pound cake with a few apricot chunks floating about and random crumble scattered all over the rectangular loaf.
But it’s much more than the sum of those parts: the crumble over the loaf in particular. I didn’t smooth the batter once spooned into the tin and showered it indiscriminately with the crumble so it dipped into batter in places and in the others batter bubbled up over crumble, lavalike. When cut, it is the luck of the drawer how much crumble your slice will be topped with.
The recipe is a cut down version of Nigel Slater’s apricot and lemon curd cake, without the curd. Considering my version is rather hefty in calorie content already, I was a little wary of adding even more pure sugar in the form of curd; the original version nevertheless is waiting in the queue to be baked.