Fresh Apple Cake With Brown Sugar Glaze

I love my neighborhood. We've lived here a year and a half now, and I've never once regretted our decision to move here. There are so many young families, a ton of families from our church live near us, our neighbors are all super friendly. It's such a complete opposite of our last neighborhood where we couldn't leave toys out in our backyard or the kids across the street would climb over our wall and steal them. Seriously. Anyway, we recently had a neighborhood picnic put on by the HOA. They provided lunch and residents were asked to bring desserts. There were pony rides, a bounce house...it was super fun. Since I'd been going crazy with Pinterest.com (see, I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm obsessed with it...I'm probably a few pins away from an intervention) I figured I'd make one of the desserts I'd pinned. This one seemed especially tasty and I had all the ingredients for it.

Fresh Apple Cake With Brown Sugar Glaze
Source: Lick The Bowl Good blog via Pinterest.com

Apple Cake:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 eggs
1/2 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups finely chopped apples
1/2 cup pecans or walnuts, chopped (optional)

Brown Sugar Glaze:
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
3 Tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 Tablespoon heavy cream

For the cake: Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8-inch pan (round or square) and set aside.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Stir with a whisk to mix everything together.

In a large bowl, mix the eggs with a hand mixer til light in color and foamy. Add the oil and vanilla and beat well.

Stir in the flour mixture with a spoon and continue stirring the batter til the flour disappears. Add the apples and nuts (if using) and stir to mix them into the batter.

Scrape batter into prepared pan and bake for 40-45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Place the hot cake on a wire cake. While it's still hot, prepare the glaze.

For the glaze: Combine all the ingredients into a saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring often, until the mixture comes to a gentle boil. Cook for 3-5 minutes.

Spoon the hot glaze over the still hot-from-the-oven cake. Let the glazed cake cool completely before serving straight from the pan.

*****

I had to improvise a bit for the glaze because I didn't have cream, but I used some half and half instead. It probably wasn't quite the same, but it seemed to do the trick. I was a little disappointed when the boys and I went to pick out dessert that no one had cut into my cake yet. So I figured I'd be the first. I was really pleased with how it came out--dense and sweet and awesome, basically. This is a great fall cake. And I loved that the glaze went on the cake while they were both still hot. One of the things I hate about cake making is having to wait for it to cool before you can frost it, so this solved that problem.

Don't mind the other dessert remnants on the plate there.