Who's Ready for Autumn? This Girl!

Autumn has finally showed her face and I am SO ready for the yummy treats that she brings!

October brings the scents of apples, cinnamon, pumpkin, and sweet potatoes and those flavors are most definitely on the menu for my blog this month. To me, these smells bring a homey feel to my life--just like that pumpkin spice latte that I get from Starbucks and the apple pie that I eat on Thanksgiving. Even though I hate when the weather gets chilly, these flavors definitely bring joy to my world!

Last Saturday, we went over my cousin's in Potomac to celebrate his 21st birthday and my aunt had asked me to bring the cake. I had no objection to this! Even though my specialty lately has been cupcakes, I was very interested in trying out a two-layer cake for the...second?...time. These cakes make me NERVOUS. My worst fear is one of my desserts falling apart and then next on that list is tasting so dry that ya never want to eat something from Liv's Bakery ever again. I can't say that the last worry has ever been a problem over the past five months...but the first one has been present and unfortunately, happened this time.

I decided to be festive and make a double-decker-snicker-doodle-apple-cinnamon-party-in-your-mouth cake for the get together. Everyone loves snicker doodles (if you don't then something is for sure wrong with ya) and everyone KNOWS cinnamon and apples go together like pretzels and chocolate...yes, one of the best combos. I found a recipe for a snicker doodle cake and decided to put cooked Gala apples (basically the filling of an apple pie) in between the two layers of cake.

 I cooked the apples for about 45 minutes on the stove with a half cup of light brown sugar, a few teaspoons of cinnamon, and a slab of butter. I was thinking of adding either cloves or nutmeg, but that reminded me too much of an apple pie and that wasn't what I was really going for with this cake. I simply wanted to successfully capture the flavors of apples and cinnamon. And that's what I did!

I iced the whole outside of the cake with the brown sugar cinnamon butter cream recipe that is on the recipe above. I used my new prep bowls to mix two different colors of icing--dark brown and rusty orange (that's actually how it came out and was utterly festive) for decorations. The tan butter cream, rusty orange, and dark brown went wonderfully together.

My boo-boo: The cake batter tasted DELECTABLE but when I took both cakes out of the oven, I decided--the distracted dummy that I was--to let them stand for only 5 minutes and then put them right on a flat surface rather than a cooling rack. They were both also upside down. This was a big no-no as one cake cracked almost completely in half. Good thing I did this the night before! So the next day, I made half of the cake recipe and it came out perfect that time :)

Next time: I would probably put more awesome-apple-filling in between both layers of cake because when it was cut at the party, some pieces only had a few small slices of apples in the middle.

What I LOVED: The icing was impeccable. My favorite flavor is cinnamon (with literally EVERYTHING) and there was so much of this in the whole cake. It was autumn in my mouth!

What did we do with the ruined cake?

Literally MOST of my roommate's doing. He sat in front of the cake, used my left over rusty orange icing, and chowed down with a fork! At least it didn't go to COMPLETE waste!