Apricot Crumble Cake

Apricots evoke strong emotions.

For poet John Ruskin, they conjured up a visual and tactile beauty. He described them as “shining in a sweet brightness of golden velvet.”

For Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, theirs was a melancholy comfort. She wrote: “At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.”

For me, apricots have always occupied a special place in my food world. For a number of years, my mother’s “paradise cake” was a family tradition for my birthday. It was a yellow cake frosted with a cooked puree of apricots and decorated with coconut. It was tart, sweet, and decadent and it was made just for me. So, for me, I guess  the tart-sweet flavor of apricots is like a reassuring hug.  I’ve looked online for the recipe, thinking that there must be a recipe for paradise cake out there somewhere, but so far I’m coming up empty.

Absent a recipe for my mother’s paradise cake, this apricot crumble cake is a sweet-tart delight.

The recipe made its way into my towering stack of “must try” recipes because of the technique used in adding the fruit. Basically, you make the cake batter, spoon it into your cake pan, arrange apricot halves on top of the batter and then sprinkle a sugary crumble topping over the whole thing. As a result, you get a real jolt of the apricots’ tart goodness before you bite into the sweet cake.  For an apricot enthusiast like me, that is a big big plus. The recipe is versatile, too. You could use nectarines, peaches, or plums in place of the apricots. How good is that?“

Every year the apricot season seems like it lasts about fifteen minutes to me. In actuality, ninety per cent of the U.S. commercial crop of apricots is grown in California and the season lasts from early May to late July.

Eek! It’s July 1.

Time to gather some of the last of this year’s crop!

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This recipe is adapted from one that appears here: http://eatlittlebird.com .

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