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.

Redwall

Since publishing my post titled Men and Guns, I've had a number of people ask me what on earth Redwall is.  Well, let me tell you, it is one of the best series I have ever read and probably the one I have read and re-read the most.  I read the first three books of the series way back when I was a second or third grader in elementary school and I have never looked back.  The picture above is of my book shelf with 20 of the 22 books of the series.  I do own all of them but I had the two missing ones with me at my apartment and have yet to unpack them.  But that is beside the point.  Redwall is a series that was written by the brilliant author Brian Jacques.  Sadly he passed away on February 5, 2011.  I cannot even begin to describe how heartbroken I was when I found out that one of my favorite authors had died and that the stories of Redwall were at an end.  He wrote the series starting with the first book, Redwall, published in 1986 all the way until his final book, The Rogue Crew, published posthumously in 2011.