I know I haven’t posted any cupcakes lately, but regular cakes keep coming up that I want to try. I’m planning a few new cupcake ideas for the next couple months so stay tuned. Until then, enjoy my write up on a delicious meal that my good friend Amber and I teamed up to make last night. Everything turned out so well, we wanted to share our creations with you.

For the dinner portion of the meal head over to Amber’s blog for a delicious Slow Cook Crockpot Roast Beef. It includes roast beef, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas, onion, apple and other tasty ingredients. Look how lovely it turned out:

We also made the best Garlic Bread I’ve ever had. For instructions on how to make awesome garlic butter for your french bread, jump over to Amber’s blog for that too.

To keep up with the apple theme of the night, we decided to make a cake. We’ve decided to call it Inverse Apple Cobbler Cake because a normal apple cobbler has a lot of apples on the bottom and a crumbly cake-like top but we reversed that a bit for this cake.

Here are the instructions:

Inverse Apple Cobbler Cake

Ingredients

For Cake:

• 1 box of yellow cake mix (or your favorite yellow cake recipe)
• cinnamon (we didn’t measure, but I’d guess about 3 tsp.)

For topping

• 1 can of vanilla or cream cheese frosting (or your favorite white frosting recipe)
• 3-4 apples*
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup tightly packed brown sugar
• 2-3 tsp. lemon juice
• cinnamon
• ground cloves
• nugmeg
• ground ginger

*Note: Our cake mix only made about a half of a batch of a normal cake mix. We used 3 apples for the topping, but for a full batch you may need 4. Add a little more water if you add more than 3 apples.

We used a peanut and egg free yellow cake mix from Cherrybrook Kitchen but we doctored it to fit our needs. We followed the cake instructions (add water and butter or margarine) but the cake looked way too dry so we ended up adding one egg to it.  Follow the directions on your cake mix box or recipe to make the batter. Since we planned to make a cinnamon apple topping, we added a bit of cinnamon to the batter too. Then we whipped it up for a couple of minutes.

The cake mix only made enough for about a half batch so we had to get a smaller baking pan to cook it in. Thankfully, Amber’s mother-in-law had the perfect sized Pyrex dish.

We baked the cake in a preheated oven at 350?F for about 25 minutes until it was cooked all the way through. To bake your cake, you should follow your cake mix box or recipe directions. While the cake baked, we started making the apple topping. It’s basically the same thing that goes in an apple cobbler.

Skin your apples and cut them into thin slices. In a pan on the stove at medium-high setting, heat some water and the apple slices until it’s at a boil then lower the temperature to low so that the water is just at a simmer. Add your spices next. We didn’t really measure this out but put a dash of the ground cloves, ginger, and nutmeg and if you really like a lot of cinnamon put a a good amount in (several shakes or so). Also add about half of the brown sugar and all of the lemon juice into the simmering apples and mix everything around. We used the other half of brown sugar at the end once a good portion of the water cooked off.

While the water is simmering, put a lid on the pan, allowing the steam to come out one side a little, and let it sit for a while. Stir often. We had our apples simmer with the lid on for about 15 minutes and then took it off for the final 5-10 minutes. It may not take you nearly as long because we put way too much water in (like close to 2 cups) so you may not need to simmer it as long. Keep an eye on it. When it’s done there won’t be very much water left, and the added brown sugar will caramelize a little. It should become a runny, gooey, brown appley treat and look a little like this:

Once it starts to look like that turn the stove off and let it sit there with the lid on until you’re ready to frost the cake.

By now your cake should be ready to come out of the oven. Ours looked like this when it came out. It looked so good, I was ready to dig into it already!

I fought my impulses and let it cool for a long time before frosting it. In fact we ate Amber’s yummy Slow Cooked Roast Beef while it cooled.

Once the cake was completely cooled we frosted it with the vanilla frosting. If I were to do this again, I’d choose cream cheese frosting instead of vanilla because the cake tasted a bit like carrot cake without the carrots, and cream cheese frosting would have been awesome here. Get it good and frosted and then add your apple topping like so:

The combination of the cake, frosting, and soft cinnamon apple topping really complimented each other nicely. I would definitely try this again sometime.

As always, if you give my recipe a try, share pictures of how it turned out on my Facebook page. Also feel free to share pictures of any other desserts you make.

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