After finishing out the harvest season with over 30,000 pounds of fruit, City Fruit has been finding ways to utilize the many crates of apples we harvested at Longacres orchard in Renton. City Fruit hosted several harvest parties at Longacres orchard this season to help harvest the 120 apple trees thriving there. These good quality apples were shared with neighbors and food banks and made into cider.
To put the remaining apples to good use in time for the holidays, we partnered with Jubilee Women’s Center and our corporate partner, Salesforce, to host a pie and cake baking event! Jubilee is a Seattle non-profit that works to support women experiencing poverty by providing the space and resources that it takes to help them find more stable and supportive solutions. We were able to use Jubilee’s kitchen to prep and bake our pies and cakes, where we had access to 2 ovens and 2 sinks, but with 15 volunteers and 5 staff members, we had to think creatively to make the space work best for us. Our volunteers moved through 3 different stations, helping to peel and slice apples, roll out dough, fill the pies, make the cakes, and switch cakes in and out of the oven. One member from Jubilee led the cake-making station where we were able to bake a total of 24 cakes! City Fruit’s Board President, Leslie Llado, led the pie making station with all of the volunteers, while Riley Wilmart led the apple peeling and slicing station, where she was able to get to know the volunteers better, and discuss more about what the mission of the event was.
In preparation for the event, City Fruit staff dedicated many hours towards preparing all of the pie dough from scratch. We chose to hand-make the pie dough so that volunteers could experience a more hands-on process when making their pies. Volunteers had fun designing and personalizing them! Some designs included lattice, autumnal leaves, and other creative designs. Two pies and three cakes were shared with Jubilee residents, while 14 pies and 21 cakes were given to African Community Housing & Development, a local non-profit that aims to support African refugee and immigrant communities, families, and individuals in King County find the necessary resources needed to sustain themselves, such as education. economic, legal, and housing needs. According to Daniel Horst, the Farmers Market & Food Access Manager at ACHD, apples feature prominently in community members’ diets and cultures, and they welcomed apple-based baked goods.
Creating these desserts took a tremendous amount of effort and collaboration across community partners and resources, and was one of the most engaged and hands-on projects that City Fruit has done! We’d like to recognize and thank our volunteers at Salesforce and Jubilee for their excitement and dedication in making the project smooth and successful and enabling City Fruit to fulfill our goal of diverting locally grown fruit from waste to communities facing food insecurity in Seattle. We look forward to creating more opportunities in the future to coordinate opportunities for community members to contribute their baking or jam-making skills to create foods that benefit our local food system.
If you’re interested in trying them out for yourself, below are the recipes for the apple pie and apple cake:
Pie filling
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/old_fashioned_apple_pie/
Dough recipe:
https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/baking-basics-homemade-buttery-flaky-pie-crust/
Apple cake recipe: