This is the bouldered and dramatic intersection of two of my favorite things: cinnamon baked apples and a thick crumb cake. I don’t know how they make crumb cake where you are, but here in New York, and where I grew up in New Jersey, crumb cake isn’t a genteel cinnamon-ribboned or finely streusel-ed coffee cake, but a hefty square that’s 50% crumb topping and 50% a golden, sour cream-enriched cake and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Thanks to brown sugar and cinnamon, the crumb topping is always a dark stripe, and a snow-cap of powdered sugar isn’t optional. Fruit is, but this is too good with fresh apples to skip them.

For such a loud and attention-demanding cake (I’m still talking about cake, I think?), no delicate slice or dice of apples will do so I use here a full pound of thick wedges snugged so tightly they barely fit in their confines, an all-too-accurate New York real estate story. Squeezing your crumbs in small handfuls before breaking them over the apples created more boulder-like pieces. Baking this cake for almost an hour at a slightly lower temperature gives the apples enough time to get tender, their juices bubbling. Your kitchen will smell, at minimum, like a blissful epiphany of apples, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and at peak melodrama, the absolutely best decision we’ve made yet in October.

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