Mini Apple Crumb Cakes

These mini apple crumb cakes sit somewhere between a muffin and a little coffee cake, with fresh diced apples, warm spices, and plenty of buttery crumbs.

🍏 They’re just as good with your morning coffee as they are served warm with whipped cream for dessert.

🍏 The cake itself is especially tender thanks to a simple baking technique called reverse creaming. It’s one of those little tricks I rediscover every few years and wonder why I don’t use more often!

🍏Packed with fresh diced apple, cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, and sour cream, these mini crumb cakes are an autumnal dream.

The reverse creaming method (it’s so easy!)

Reverse creaming turns the usual cake-making method on its head. Instead of beating butter and sugar together, you mix the butter into the dry ingredients first, until the mixture looks like fine, damp crumbs. Then you add the wet ingredients.

• Coating the flour with butter limits gluten development, giving these mini apple cakes an especially fine, soft, tender crumb.
• It also makes the batter quick to put together, with less mixing to worry about.

I’ve experimented with reverse creaming over the years, and every time I do, I wonder why I don’t use it more often!e it more often. It takes no extra time or special equipment. You can use a stand mixer, but I made these little crumb cakes entirely by hand.

When does a muffin become a cake?

There’s no hard-and-fast rule, but muffins are generally less sweet, and tend to have a coarser, sturdier crumb, while cakes are softer, finer, and more delicate.

These mini apple crumb cakes blur the line. They’re baked in muffin tins, but the reverse-creaming method gives them a tender, cake-like texture. Add a generous buttery crumb topping, and I’d say they’ve earned the title of cake.