An Abundance of Apples

What do you do with so many apples after you have a beautiful day of apple picking?!


I personally spend hours and hours on Epicurious, Allrecipes, Food Network, Chowhound, Google, etc., looking for recipes and ideas to use up all these apples!

I was in the mood for apple cake because it just felt a little too early for apple pie. So I was on a mission. I didn't want just any kinda apple cake though. I wanted an apple SPICE cake.

After several hours, over a span of 4 days, I found the winning recipe...
Old-Fashioned Apple Cake with Brown Sugar Frosting from the King Arthur Flour website.

I would have preferred a crispier apple (such as Granny Smith) but we only were allowed to pick

Macouns
and

Red Delicious

As I finished mixing all the ingredients, I was really nervous because the cake "batter" was really chunky and crumbly like cookie dough... really firm!

See?! But after pressing it down into the baking pan with wet fingers (as it was suggested in the directions) it had more of a cake-like texture. But then it looked like I put in too many apples!

But no worries... after it came out of the oven, it was beautiful. Perfectly puffed and a nice golden brown. Not to mention the most delicious fall spice aroma EVER!!


After the cake cooled down, I released the beast...

The apples had carmelized and the sides were sticky and super moist.

And then came the sexy Brown Sugar Frosting drizzle down the side...

I know you want some!

Well, I got some...

And my verdict? EFFING AWESOME!!! It's so incredibly moist from the apples. There's plenty of spice. The nuts add the perfect amount of crunch. The frosting, I must admit I thought it was going to be too sweet, but it really was the perfect accompaniment to the apples!

The only changes I would make for the next time... USE CRISPIER APPLES! I prefer to have some crunch in baked apple goods.

Note to self: Next time, try a Mascarpone cream based frosting... I think the tangy-ness would go really well with the spicey-sweet apples. Or for a more playful take on this cake, some kind of Peanut Butter frosting? Apples and Peanut Butter... you can't go wrong!