"Novelty" chocolate cake

I am sorry for a poor photo of this cake, that's all what I could salvage in the morning! It is now officially our daughters favorite cake and it must run in a family, as it also was her grandpa's favorite. I never made it at home before though; normally we bought it from a cake shop back at home, ever since it appeared there in the 80ties, under a rather plain name "Novelty". I tried to find a recipe for that original one, unsuccessfully, but in one of the forums someone gave an idea that it must be a butter-whipped based cream in some proportion and I could puzzle it out from there. Mind, this is not a very big cake, so for a celebration you might want to do a double portion.

Need:
Cake layer ingredients:
5 eggs,
5 table spoons of sugar,
5 table spoons of flour

Cream ingredients:
200 g good butter
200 g cream for whipping
100g good dark chocolate (70% cacao)

100g dark chocolate and 2 spoons of milk for top

Separate egg yolks from whites. Beat the whites separately, beat the yolks with sugar. Sift the flour (do not skip sifting!) into the bowl and carefully mix it with egg whites and egg yolks. Do not use mixer for this, it will ruin it! Just easy, slowly mix with the spoon or hand. Also, if you are making double portion, first make and bake half, then make the other half. This pastry cannot stay long after it has been made, so it is wise to make only what you can bake at once.

Put baking paper on an oven plate, pour the mix on it, even it out. Bake at 160C for 20-30 min, depending on how thick the layer is. Cut it into 3 same size sheets (middle one does not have to be intact, as long as it is more or less covering same surface, the sides work well for that one).

While cake layers are cooling off, prepare the cream. Beat room temperature butter til white and fluffy (10 min, same add as for whipped cream). Melt chocolate in a water bath (smaller bowl with chocolate put in a large bowl with hot water). Whip cold whipped cream. Add melted chocolate to butter, then mix it with whipped cream.

Note: if you melt chocolate some other way, it has to be cool enough before you add it to butter. If it melts in water bath, it is similar process as if it melts in your hands, so that is more or less temperature you have to aim for.

Do a layer of cake, a layer of cream, a layer of cake, a layer of cream, a layer of cake. Pour molten chocolate (mixed with a bit of milk) on top and let it soak through in a fridge for a day, but this cake is best when it was out of a fridge for a bit before serving, so keep that in mind before bringing it to the table.

Fluffy Apple Pie

There are a lot of apple pie recipes, but there always is the one you tend to fall back to, an all time favorite if you will. This one is definitely the one for me, even though I have a few more apple goodness related sentiments.
So... good 20 years back I used to go to this university cafe, with a very presumptions name "Lambada". It had nothing to do with Latin culture, nor with the famous song; actually it could not have been even more far from it, as it was located in a thick walled old Gothic cellar ("The flight of the Valkyr" probably would have been a more suiting name), but they did have a great apple pie (that was about the only thing that was exceptional about that place to be honest). It took me a bit of puzzling to figure out how to make something similar (because, obviously, they do not print recipes on the menu), but after some trial and error, it turned out to be very simple and fail proof recipe.
Need:
4 eggs
200 g of sugar
200 g of sour cream (thick)
2 cups of flour
50 g of butter
2 tea spoons of baking powder
5 apples

The choice of apples matters, I prefer them to be rather dry and sour, some kind of winter variety. I usually do not peel apples if the skin looks all right, just cut them in chunks (after taking out seed pods of course), but if you peel them it is fine too. Further it is fairly simple:
Melt the butter (microwave works fine too), use part of it to butter the sides of the baking form (I use 20x20 cm form);
Mix eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and left over butter, until it is smooth;
Pour half of the mix into a form, put in the apples, pour the remaining half of the mix on top of them, make sure that no apples are sticking out (because they tend to burn).
Bake for about 40-60 min on 180C, check with a wooden stick if it is ready (stick should come out clean out of the pie.
Take out of the form (carefully, as sometimes it does not want to come out nicely, plops out and breaks), let it cool off and enjoy; or if you feel like you deserve it, add some sugar powder on top or eat it with a good spoon of whipped cream.