Brown Sugar Apple Sharlotka Recipe

This brown sugar apple sharlotka recipe is also known as a Russian sponge cake. Easy to make, this is a comforting dessert with a crackly top!

October is here and to me that means apples and pumpkins and lots of leaves to rake!

I’ve already filled my freezer with tons of applesauce and my fridge is filled with grape, plum and raspberry jams.

I still have to make the last of my oregano and basil into pesto and then I might be ready for the chill of winter. But I’m skipping ahead, aren’t I?

Fall is one of my favorite times of year.

It allows me to transition not only physically, but mentally, from a time of relative relaxation (think deck sitting in summer) to an urgent, more demanding season.

I only have to look at the squirrels to know what they are thinking about.

The glory of fall, I believe, is that it allows us to appreciate what is behind us and lets us have some time to get ready for all we still have yet to do.

Enter the apple. After a bumper crop of apples, and crab apples, it has been hard to get them out of my mind.

We’ve had to rake them from our front yard to keep our yard from smelling like a still.

This however brings every squirrel and rabbit in the neighborhood, right to our front door.

I’m not sure if they get dizzy from eating these apples, but I can tell you that they leave way too many for me to pick up.

I finally had to tell Manservant to stop sorting the good apples from the bad, because the freezer was full!

But back to Whole Foods. Yesterday on a rainy, cold, gray day, I ventured out and filled my senses in their produce department.

Apples of various varieties from Ela Family Farms, a local grower that produces Jonathans, Galas and Honeycrisps, quickly caught my eye.

Other apples of many varieties were also available and all looked so resplendent in shades of green and red, and even yellow.

My guess is that each state in the country has their own regional varieties and it would be fun to hear what you can find that I can’t.

Besides all the fresh apples, Whole Foods has a wide array of apple recipes and apple products including their apple pies, caramel apples, apple soap, maple, apple and bacon pizza (YUM!), apple soup and others too numerous to mention!

The timing of this all coincided with my receiving the latest Food and Wine issue that features a sharlotka on the last page of the magazine.

I had never made one before and loved the idea that a cake could have no butter. Who would have thought?

Now the picture I took looks nothing like the one in the magazine, but I’ll wager it tastes better!