Apples, spices, dried cranberries, pecans, and pumpkin seeds — perfect combination of fall flavors for a bundt cake! This apple bundt cake is hearty, but still tender and light! I don’t care what others say, this definitely counts as breakfast đŸ˜‰
I had some apples I had to use, so I thought a bundt cake would be the perfect vehicle for some fall-heavy flavors. You can either use honeycrisp or granny smith apples, but in my case, I used one of each. Additionally, you can make this recipe your own by choosing your own add-ins. For me, I thought chopped pecans, dried cranberries, and pepitas (or pumpkin seeds) would go really well with the apples. Plus, these would add some variety in the texture. Feel free to sub any of those with whatever you want! Just keep them between 1/4-1/2 cup each.
The spices
As you may have noticed, I chose to use chai to spice my apple bundt cake. If you don’t have chai, you can make your own using my masala chai mix recipe. Otherwise, you can definitely try the following variations:
- Keeping it simple? Use 2 tsp cinnamon + 1 tsp nutmeg
- Want a bit more variety? Try 1 tsp cinnamon + 1 tsp cardamom + 1 tsp nutmeg
- Feeling fancy? Combine 1 tsp cinnamon + 1 tsp cardamom + 1/2 tsp nutmeg + 1/2 tsp allspice
As you can see, you can really play around with different spices. The only advice I can give is use at least 1 tsp of cinnamon if you’re adding other spices to it. Depending on what spices you already have available in your pantry, just use 1/2 tsp of the other spices until the total amount of spices in the bundt cake equals 3 tsp.
Tools you’ll need
Ingredients
Cake batter
- 3 cups flour
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
- 3/4 cup brown sugar
- 3/4 cup white sugar
- 3 eggs, room temp
- 1/2 cup sour cream, room temp
- 1/2 tbsp vanilla extract
- 3 tsp masala chai mix*
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 apples, honeycrisp or granny smith or 1 of each, chopped into small cubes, about 2.5 cups
- 1/2 cup chopped pecans
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries (optional)
- 1/4 cup pepitas (optional)
Maple cream cheese frosting
- 8 oz cream cheese, softened
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
Instructions
- Preheat the oven at 350 degrees.
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugars until the mixture is fairly homogenous. Add the melted butter, vegetable oil, sour cream, and vanilla extract.
- Sift in the flour, masala chai mix, kosher salt, and baking soda into your wet ingredients and mix until everything is fully incorporated. Make sure to not overmix!
- Toss the chopped apples, chopped pecans, pepitas, and dried cranberries with a bit of flour in a small separate bowl (maybe about 1.5 tbsp). This is just to prevent most of your add ins sinking to the bottom of the cake when it bakes. Once that's done, fold all the add ins in your batter.
- Pour evenly in a greased bundt cake pan and bake for 60-65 minutes. Check the doneness by using a toothpick or chopstick--it should come out fairly clean. Mine took about 63 minutes.
- While your apple bundt cake bakes, make your frosting by mixing the softened cream cheese with maple syrup using a hand mixer. Set aside in the fridge.
- After the cake bakes, let it cool for 45 minutes to an hour. It should not be sticking to the sides of the pan. Flip the bundt cake onto a serving plate. Wait until your cake is fully cool before pouring the frosting.
- Pour as much of the frosting as you want. You can always save some of it to put on top of each cake slice once you're ready to serve. Enjoy!
Notes
*If you don't have chai mix or don't want to make your own using my recipe, you can instead use 2 tsp cinnamon with 1 tsp nutmeg. Otherwise, feel free to look at the other spice variations in the blog post.
// ON THE SCENE
- Back backdrop: Replica Surfaces — Weathered Wood
- Bottom backdrop: Woodville Workshop — Amsterdam
- Props: mason jars, jar of flour, apple, gauze towel