First Slice at the Cottage
There are certain smells that seem to make a house feel instantly like home. Warm apples. Cinnamon. Brown sugar. A cake baking in the oven while you’re puttering around getting ready for people to arrive.
Last week, as I prepared Fern & Fable Cottage for our Petals & Plaster workshop, that smell was Apple Fritter Cake.
It was our very first workshop here at the cottage, which meant there was a slightly ridiculous amount of fussing happening beforehand.
Flowers were gathered. Aprons were hung. Plaster was measured. Chairs were moved. The table was set, reconsidered and probably adjusted several more times than anyone other than me would ever notice.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, there was cake!
I’ve always loved the idea that a Fern & Fable gathering should feel a little more like being invited into someone’s home than arriving for a formal class.
Yes, we’re here to make something.
But we’re also here to settle in. To have something delicious. To talk to the person across the table. To laugh when things don’t quite go according to plan. And hopefully to leave feeling like the evening was about more than the thing we made.
So cake feels important.
Not fancy cake.
Not perfectly piped, professionally photographed, nobody touch it until I get the picture cake.
Good, cozy, cut-yourself-another-piece cake.
And this Apple Fritter Cake was exactly that.
The cake
I used Ashley Fehr’s Apple Fritter Cake from The Recipe Rebel, and it turned out to be just the sort of cozy fall cake I wanted for the evening — apples, cinnamon, a sweet glaze and all those wonderful flavours that make an apple fritter so dangerously easy to justify eating.
You can find the original recipe here:
It also felt particularly appropriate to serve an apple cake in a little cottage surrounded by Kelowna orchards. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I cut myself the first piece before any of my guests arrived.
I briefly wondered if that was poor hostess etiquette!
Then I remembered:
It’s my house.
Someone had to perform quality control.
The cake passed.
A little note from my kitchen
Mine needed a bit longer in the oven than the recipe suggested, particularly through the centre, so if you make it yourself, I’d trust your toothpick more than your timer.
Old cottage oven? Particularly enthusiastic apples? Baking gremlins? Who knows.
But it was worth the wait.
Later that evening, eight women gathered around the big studio table for Petals & Plaster.
We rolled clay, chose flowers and leaves, mixed plaster, rescued one casting that decided it had absolutely no intention of waiting for us before it set, talked, laughed and learned from one another.
And when our hands needed a break, there was Apple Fritter Cake waiting in the kitchen.
That little part matters to me.
Because Fern & Fable isn’t really about becoming good at crafts.
It’s about creating reasons to gather.
Reasons to try something you’ve never tried before.
Reasons to sit around a table with people you may not have known a couple of hours earlier.
Reasons to slow down for an evening, make something with your hands and enjoy being exactly where you are.
And perhaps reasons to eat Apple Fritter Cake on an ordinary Saturday evening.
I think we could all use a few more of those.
Here’s to warm kitchens, messy tables, trying new things, and always making enough cake to share.
No perfection. Good company.
— Karen @ Fern & Fable Cottage
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