When is the last time that you made a cake from scratch?

Until recently, if you’d asked me, I would have said that I only ever made cakes from scratch, and I would have believed that to be true. But if I were making, for example, an apple cake, I would have employed a number of little tricks to do it. I would have peeled the apples with a vegetable peeler, shredded the fruit in a food processor. I would have softened the butter just a bit in my microwave, used a hand mixer to cream the sugar into it. I might have even (gasp!) used Pam to grease the baking dish.

In Rome this fall, I found myself without recourse to any of my usual tricks. I had no food processor or hand mixer; I didn’t even have a vegetable peeler (although one did come in our shipment, which finally arrived in late November) and cooking spray is not on any of the grocery shelves I’ve visited. So when I decided to make King Arthur’s Old-Fashioned Apple Cake with Brown Sugar Icing, I had to do it much more “from scratch” than I’m accustomed to.

Let me tell you, making a cake completely from scratch took forever. Peeling the apples with a paring knife, then fine-dicing them by hand, took the better part of an hour. Creaming together the butter and sugar was a learning process that involved a spatula, a spoon, a fork, and a fair bit of mess. Beating in the eggs was easy enough, until I realized that my creaming method needed work, and had to systematically mash out every stray lump of butter. By the time I got the cake in the oven, my forearms ached, the kitchen was a mess, and I’d used almost every tool I had at the time. It took me as long to clean up as it did for the cake to bake, and then I still had the frosting to make.

It was an epic pain in nearly every way. It didn’t cut well, wasn’t even very pretty, and yet… damned if it isn’t one of the best cakes I’ve made in recent memory, or at least one of the ones I’m most proud of. I suppose it all goes to show: sometimes the things that are the hardest are also the most worthwhile.