The Search for Kreibel Cake

Recently my great aunt told me about a recipe her mother used to make, which she called "kreibel cake". The spelling may be off, as may be her pronunciation, but she remembered it as being "cry-bull", as in rhyming with tribal. She believes the cake is of German origin, since her mother was German. She described to me what sounded like a German apple cake - a cake-like base with a layer of apples in the middle and a crumble topping, with no oats. It was called a cake and it was always cut into squares. My grandfather, grandmother, and my mother all remembered this cake, but because my great grandmother had always made it from memory, the recipe was never written down anywhere and never passed on. It's a shame, because they all made the cake sound so good. So using my German connections and googling skills, I set about to find the recipe, or a least something acceptably similar. 

The word kreibel and numerous variations on the spelling turned up only names of people, not desserts. Finally with much searching and help, it was concluded that kreibel is a very regional word used in Eastern Germany, basically meaning the same as streusel, which is a German word but is also commonly used in English. So kreibel cake seemed to be the equivalent of streuselkuchen, though stresuelkuchen does not necessarily contain apples, but is usually a yeast dough with a thick stresuel (butter, flour, and sugar crumble) topping. This is a bit different from traditional German apple cakes, which are more cake-like and don't always contain the streusel. I searched some recipes, trying to find the one that would be the closest, and found something else, krummeltorte, which is essentially a German apple crumble cake. I decided to try a recipe for this, and although it was absolutely delicious, everyone who had tasted the original kreibel cake agreed it wasn't the same. The kreibel cake, for example, used chopped apples, and this cake used sliced. So I will have to keep looking for the right recipe, in the meantime, I will post the recipe I used tomorrow because it is scrumptious!