How To Make Tennessee Apple Stack Cake

If you grew up in Tennessee, you may know apple stack cake as a homey regional specialty that sometimes bears the name of the state itself, going by Tennessee Mountain Cake in some old cookbooks. If you’ve never been to Tennessee but love apples and cake (or both), then you really must know about this old-fashioned dessert.

Like many classic desserts, it’s a labor of love, a pastime for a weekend afternoon, but once assembled, it is the kind of cake that can be enjoyed all week long. There are four steps to making apple stack cake, and you can break the prep work in two steps. Pair it with a warm cup of coffee or tea and see how easily a conversation lingers over this homey cake.

Apple stack cakes are dense and moist, rich with deep molasses flavor and a hearty apple flavor — worth all the quirks of their unusual assembly.

Tennessee apple cake is a unique cake: You shape and bake the layers without a cake pan so that they are dry and brittle, then moisten them back up with a dried apple filling that is both sweet and spiced. Then you wrap the cake up and wait, a day at least but preferably more, for the filling to moisten the cake layers and for the two elements of the cake to become one.

Apple stack cake isn’t a cake you make without a plan since it takes several hours of work before you even get to the assembling part. Some of this work is hands-off and you can break the prep work into two steps, accomplishing both in separate cooking sessions over the course of a day or two. Here’s your apple stack cake master plan.

• First, make the apple filling: Essentially you are making an applesauce from dried apples by simmering them with water and spices and a bit of brown sugar. Once they are soft and pliable, they’re puréed in a food processor. No, you cannot use fresh apples and no, you cannot substitute store-bought applesauce. Trust me, I tried and I’ve got some tales to tell on that below. You can make the apple filling two to three days in advance, or you can make it while preparing the cake layers.
• Make a cake batter and chill it: The batter for apple stack cake is pretty typical. You cream together butter and sugar, then add eggs, a flour mixture, and some buttermilk. Instead of immediately pouring the batter into cake pans, however, it’s chilled so it will spread easier. That’s right — I said spread!
• Bake the cake rounds: Apple stack cake requires six layers and it must be dry and sturdy for assembly (it has to hold the weight of the apple filling). So the cake batter is spread into rounds on parchment paper and baked without cake pans. This makes for quicker baking and assembly and for drier, sturdier layers.
• Assemble the cake and wait: Time is a key ingredient in apple stack cake. Once assembled, the cake should be wrapped to press the layers together and refrigerated for at least 24 hours. Not overnight, not 12 hours, but a minimum of 24 hours. While the cake waits, it improves greatly and will become tastier, moister, and easier to slice.

Apple stack cake comes out of a preservation culture of the Tennessee mountains. Traditionally, the cake would be made from apple slices that the home baker would have picked, prepped, and dried themselves.

While some recipes suggest that applesauce can be a substitute for the apple filling, I suspect most of these bakers were making their own applesauce and cooked it down considerably for making apple stack cake. My attempt at an apple stack cake with applesauce disintegrated into a heap of mush before I could slice the cake.

The benefits of using dried apples are two-fold: The dried apples have a concentrated apple flavor that holds up to cooking and processing, and with considerable moisture removed before cooking, they add a rich thickness to the resulting filling. If you have any trouble finding dried apples in your local grocery store (oddly I did) check your local apple orchard or order them online.

Baking the cake rounds is the most finicky part of apple stack cake, but having tested a few methods for baking the rounds, I can assure you that chilling the batter and then spreading it onto parchment paper is actually more fail-proof than baking the batter in cake pans or a skillet. This is counterintuitive, but baking in the cake pans during testing led to more broken cakes. Here are two ways to make baking the cake rounds without a pan faster and easier.

• Use a cake pan to draw a template for the rounds: Trace around the edge of a cake pan on your parchment paper and then flip the parchment over and spread the cake into rounds.
• Work one cake layer at a time: You can find a swift rhythm for spreading out the cake layers, baking one while you shape the other so that you aren’t waiting in between layers or having to cram all the cakes in the oven at one time.

Once you have a cool filling and cool cakes, it’s time for assembling! Assembly is pretty straightforward: You’re stacking cake layers with equal layers of filling. If you have any layers of cake that crack or break, make them one of the middle layers and repair the crack with the filling as glue.

Tightly wrap the cake and refrigerate for 24 hours. This is when the cake will transform from layers of filling and cake, rough and a bit dry, into a cake that is homogenous and moist. If you try to cut the cake before the 24 hours are up, you’ll find the layers will still be a bit dry and crumble when cut.