You’ve doubtless read about the infamous “Neiman Marcus” cookie recipe, an urban myth that’s been circulating for years. If you haven’t, you can catch up with the yarn here:

 

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/fooddrink/a/cookie_recipe.htm

 

However, this story really IS true, and the recipe is good as well! A few years ago, my friend Heather often used to visit her sister who owned a craft shop next to a nice little coffee shop in Mt Roskill South, a suburb of Auckland. The coffee shop was called The Village Green. It used to make an apple cake that Heather adored, and it became an obsession with her to get hold of the recipe for it.

 

One day when she was visiting her sister and sampling the cake, she noticed that the café had a sign in the window adverting for a part time dish washer / waitress, so she took the job! She worked there just long enough to get her hands on the apple cake recipe, then quit again! And she passed the recipe on to me. The café is long gone, but the recipe lives on, so here it is:

 

Melt 125g butter in a good sized saucepan. Stir in 1 cup of sugar and 1 egg. Then add 2 cups of whole meal flour, half a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of mixed spice, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 cup raisins, 1 tsp of baking soda, and one and a half apples, sliced with the skins on. You can also add ½ cup of chopped walnuts, but that’s optional.

 

Bake in a loose bottomed tin 50 – 60 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. Just tip the mix into the tin, don’t pack it down. No matter how strange it looks, it all comes out just right! Serve it warm with cream or ice cream, or cold on its own. It’s very versatile.

 

This story has a funny footnote. At the time Heather gave me the recipe I wasn’t much of a cook, but it was so easy that I actually baked it and it became a family favorite. A few months later Heather lost her own copy of the recipe. She hunted high and low but couldn’t find it anywhere. She hadn’t given it to anyone else, and almost didn’t bother to ask me about it, as she knew I didn’t bake. I gave it back to her of course, but it was very tempting to ask her to wash my dishes for a week!