NO-BAKE CAKE WITH APPLES, COOKIES AND VANILLA CREAM
INGREDIENTS:
(tray 23*28cm)
250 g Petit Beurre biscuits
For the apple cream:
1.2 kg of apples
100-120g sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 sachet of Bourbon vanilla sugar
For the vanilla cream:
500ml milk
the seeds of 1 vanilla pod or 1 teaspoon of vanilla paste/vanilla extract
20g flour
20 g of starch
3 egg yolks
80g sugar
120g butter – min. 80% fat
For decoration:
2 packs of Milka chocolate biscuits – 300 g
or 120 g of Petit Beurre biscuits glazed with 150 g of milk chocolate
PREPARATION:
I started to prepare the cake with the vanilla cream, which will need more cooling time. I put 400 ml of milk on the fire, once heated, with the seeds of a vanilla pod and the sugar.
In a deep bowl, I beat the eggs, add flour and starch, mix until smooth and dissolve everything with 100 ml of milk. I poured the hot milk over the egg mixture with flour and starch, mixed well, then poured everything back into the pan and put the pan on the stove over low heat. I stirred very often, so that when it starts to thicken, it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. I left it on the stove until it was thick, like pudding.
I took the pan off the heat and added the butter. I mixed until I got a homogeneous composition. I put a cling film directly on the surface of the cream (to avoid the formation of a crust), then I put the jar to cool.
When I want to speed up the cooling, I put very cold water in the sink and I put the pot in the water. Finally, I add ice cubes to the water in the sink.
I went to the next step. in a very large bowl I put water with lemon juice. I washed the apples and peeled them, then passed them through the coarse grater. I put the grated apples one by one in water with lemon juice to avoid oxidation. From the moment I start shaving the first apple, until I finish the operation, the first ones would oxidize and have a brown color. When I finished grating all the apples, I drained them very well, then mixed with caster sugar, Bourbon vanilla sugar and ground cinnamon. I put them in a high-sided saucepan and heated them over medium-high heat until all the liquid evaporated. To be on the safe side, the apples can be put in a colander until they cool. Stir occasionally to help remove the liquid. To be able to easily remove the cake from the mold, I put food paper, but you can also put baking paper or aluminum foil. In the last row, there were no whole cookies in the pan, so I cut them so that everything was continuous. I took into account where I put the cut cookies so that subsequent layers follow the same layout pattern. This will make it easier to cut the cake by reshaping the edges of the cookies, without risking deforming the layers when cutting.
On top of the first layer of cookies I put the cooled apples (or very slightly warm – if they are hot the cookie starters will soften too much), and on top I laid out another row of cookies following the basic model.
I put the completely cooled vanilla cream on the second layer of cookies, leveled it, then arranged the third layer of cookies. I chose Milka’s chocolate cookies because I had some in my house (I developed a passion for them last month).
But, the chocolate cookies were a little bigger than the ones used in the layers of the cake. This was solved very easily by cutting the side edges, without damaging the chocolate model.
If you don’t have chocolate biscuits, you can use another layer of Petit Beurre biscuits (120g) and decorate with 150g of milk chocolate melted in a bain-marie.
I covered the cake with cling film and put a wooden bottom on it (directly on the cake, not on the mold). Its weight will help the layers stick together well.
I left the cake in the refrigerator until the next day, then I portioned it following the shapes given by the biscuits. I used a thin bladed knife and wiped its blade clean after each cut.
If the apple layer looks more “ruffled” after cutting, you can level it with the blade of the knife.
