Swiss Apple Roulade--Surprisingly, from Poland

It is apple season. And I have just realized that so far I have not posted too many apple recipes. Back in Poland, I used apples a lot, at least once a week, mainly for baking cakes and pies. Here not so much anymore. Maybe because in the US I can buy all kinds of fruits and vegetables that I did not eat often then, and I keep exploring new recipes with fruits I never tried before.

Also, I cannot find here the cooking apples that we had in Poland in great variety, not necessarily the perfect looking ones, beautiful and shiny, but rather the sour and rough looking but very aromatic apples that would ripen in late fall and still be hard when harvested. They would soften nicely when baked and with the addition of some sugar would make a perfect dessert, so I am afraid to share a recipe that would be disappointing if a wrong kind of apple is used. Besides, in my yard, in Poland I had at least four different apple trees. Whenever we felt like, we had all kinds of apples within the reach of our hands, for eating raw or for cooking and serving in different dishes.

But recent fall weather made me think about apples more. Also, my son,a picky eater enjoys apple desserts very much, so I decided to make a couple of them recently. Today's recipe comes from my aunt who is a very good cook, but an even better baker.

Apple Roulade

Ingredients:
4 eggs,
1/2 cup sugar,
3/4 cup all purpose flour,
1 tsp baking powder,
2 tbsp hot water,
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon,
5-6 cooking apples (I used McIntosh),
icing sugar for dusting.

Preparation:
1. Line a large square baking cookie sheet with a wax paper. Grease the top of the paper with butter.
2. Peel off apples and grate them on a large wholes grater. Add cinnamon, mix it in, and spread apples on the buttered wax paper.
3. Preheat oven to 330F.
4. Separate egg yolks from whites. Put whites in a a large bowl or a stand-up mixer and beat them until almost stiff. Add gradually sugar and continue to beat until all the sugar dissolves.
5. Add yolks to the whites and mix with a spatula. Add hot water and mix again. Sift in flour and baking powder and fold them gently in the batter.
6. Spread a batter on top of the apples.

7. Put the cooking sheet in the oven and bake the cake for about 40 minutes, or until the top is set and gold.
8. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool slightly, but not completely.
9. Turn it upside down on a smooth surface (wax paper up). Remove gently the paper. Starting with one end roll up the cake into a roulade. Let it cool down completely.
10. Dust with icing sugar, cut into slices, and serve.