Caramel Apple Cake

For Thanksgiving this year, I decided to go ahead and bake the dessert and try something new.  A month or two back I had picked up an issue of Food Network magazine.  It had some really good recipes in it, but the recipe I really wanted to try was this cake that had been made to look like a caramel apple.  It was absolutely amazing and it was rated as easy, so I figured it would be something fun to make for Thanksgiving to kind of shake up our normal menu.  Since I had to work Thanksgiving, I made the cake the night before.  The recipe said that it would take about two hours, but with it being my first time, I figured it might take more like two and a half to three.  It took five.  For all that the recipe said it was easy, it was not.  I'm guessing it was rated easy because you made the cake using box mix instead of from scratch and there weren't all that many ingredients.  Actually building the cake though was far from easy.

The first part, just baking the cakes and then stacking them on each other went quite well.  Trimming the cake afterward, to start making it look like an apple also went well up until I began trying to use the pieces I had cut off to make the top part of the apple.  The recipe said to crumble up the trimmings and then use some icing to get it to mold together so you could work with it.  Easier said than done.  It wasn't until my brilliant mother had the idea of trying to add some water that I finally got it to cooperate.  Even then it still took some time to get it shaped correctly.  Trying to ice the cake after finishing that part was also not easy.  The picture with the recipe shows that icing going on perfectly smoothly and evenly and it looks absolutely lovely.  As you can see in the above picture, my icing was not so obliging.

After sticking the cake in the freezer for a bit to let everything solidify, I added some more icing to the top part of the cake and then began to paint away.  That part was quite enjoyable and fairly easy too.  Then came the next difficult part.  Softening the caramel and then rolling it out.  This was totally new for me since I have never worked with caramel in this way.  It was fun though slightly challenging.  Rolling out the caramel took much longer than I had anticipate because it needed to be a certain length and width.  Still, with my father's help I managed it.  Then came probably the hardest part of all.  Figuring out how to wrap a twenty-six inch long piece of caramel, studded with peanuts, around a cake.  Naturally the instructions and pictures in the recipe made it sound like it was a piece of cake.  Again, it was not.  It didn't quite work according to plan, but between my parents and I, we got it taken care of.  And so after five very long hours, it was completed.

 

So, while it didn't look as perfect as the cake in the picture with the recipe, I was quite pleased with myself.  Baking is not something I do very often, so I felt quite accomplished completing it.  I don't know how much you can tell from the picture, but this was a big cake.  It weighed over ten pounds and was probably close to a foot tall.  Definitely not something I would want to do everyday, but for the holiday it was a lot of fun and it tasted pretty good too!  I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!