Chocolate Castles

This cake is very different from the apple cakes I make. It cooks the apples in a butter-cinnamon mixture before adding to cake batter!

Kelly Minter is a wonderful teacher and author of Bible studies for women for which I am taking right now! At the end of each week of study, Kelly gives recipes that I have loved! This apple cake sounds so good. I am making it this weekend!

Apples

1 cup chopped apples (I am using Gala)

2 tables butter

1 tables sugar

2 tables light brown sugar

1 teas cinnamon

Cake Batter

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar (I use light)

1/2 cup softened butter

1 cup sour cream

1 teas vanilla

5 large eggs

2 1/2 cups flour

1 teas baking powder

1 teas baking soda

Pinch of salt

1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat oven to 350 degrees!

Butter A Bundt cake pan, including the tube, and dust lightly with flour, shaking out any excess. Set aside.

in a skillet over medium heat, cook the apples with the butter, sugars, and cinnamon. Don’t over cook the apples as they should keep their shape. Set aside.

for the cake batter combine the sugars, butter, and sour cream in a large mixing bowl and beat until fluffy. Add vanilla and eggs until well combined. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture. Fold in apples and nuts. Bake at 350° for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Transfer to wire rack and let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes before turning out on a plate. Frost with your favorite brown sugar or browned butter frosting!

What better way to begin this cold weather than with a slice of pecan pie for yourself or for you northern folks PEE CAN pie! We just got back from having our traditional Wednesday night enchilada dinner! It is a windy evening with temps in low 40’s and as we drove home, the beginnings of trees having been already decorated with tiny white lights line our street! What a glorious sight and just makes me want to bake more. Because I was just dying to bake this afternoon, I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to bake as everything sounded good. So I ask Peter Pumpkin what he might like for desert tonight. He replied with “well, if you really want to know what I would like I would say pecan pie!” So that’s what we have! When I began to look thru the different recipes from some of my cookbooks I came across this one from Fredericksburg Home Kitchen Cook Book (which my MIL gave to me years ago). It sounded perfect AND didn’t use as much butter as the recipes I have used in the past so I decided to give it a try! After all, Peter Pumpkin reminds me that since we are in our “golden years” we probably should start thinking about cutting back on good foods like butter! It was then that I informed him that our golden years were appropriately named for the fact that we were the age where we should be able to have all the butter we liked! Butter is golden!!!

So here is the recipe and I hope you like it as much as we do! And since I only ate one enchilada I can have two pieces tonight!

3 eggs

3/4 cup sugar

2 teas vanilla

3/4 cup light corn syrup

1 cup finely chopped pecans

3 Tablespoons butter, melted

1 9″ unbaked pie shell

Combine eggs and syrup, mix well. Add sugar and beat with wire whisk. Add vanilla. Let stand for 5 minutes. Add pecans and melted butter. Mix well and pour into pie shell. Bake in preheated 375 degree oven for about 35-40 minutes until pie is firm to touch in middle!

Seriously cut back on butter, who is he kidding? After all, we went without a lot of butter for 3 months in Italy so our arteries had a chance to clear!

This week has been such a time of reflection of where we have come from and how God has brought us back to this place.

Maybe it is the Fall temperatures which have been so welcomed this past week (even had a tornado hit about 1/2 mile from where we live) which has given us a few nights of rain and cloudy days and of course, made me want to bake everyday.

Things now are back to normal as we are totally settled and feel that sometimes we never left Dallas at all! We kind of somehow just fell into our old way of life with some of the same friends who we have done “life” with for some many years. And while that feels wonderful to be able to do that, we also get excited to see the new ways God will use us and new folks that we are getting to meet! This week we had some new friends over for dinner along with a friend who we have known for 20 yrs. It was such a great reminder to us that while it is always so good to still get together with friends who we have memories with, it is so neat to be sitting there making a new memory with people who we have just met!

As we continue to think back over the last 10 yrs of our lives, it is with a great fondness that we can talk about what The Lord has done for us in spite of some trials and unwanted circumstances which came our way! Looking back, we know that God was still working in our lives to bring us to a point which grew us closer to Him and that He has allowed our hearts to heal from the hard days back in 2013 when we left California. Today as we drove out of the church parking lot, I turned to Randy and said “this is the first time I have truly felt like I’m home since we left Pasadena”. It has been a long journey back here! The Lord allowed us a time in a wilderness, not only physically but spiritually! Each place He has taken us has taught us lessons which we might not have learned without being there! Lessons which included times of learning to trust God when we didn’t feel His presence! A lesson that taught us that He is always faithful to lead and guide even though some of the places He took us were not places that “felt right” at the time and used us in spite of our inadequacies. We have learned that if we want to experience spiritual blessings in our lives, we must be totally surrendered to His will, not ours! We must, in our times of brokenness, remember that we still have things that God can take and use for His glory! That our faith, no matter how small, can grow “even when our vision is blurred! That faithfulness isn’t measured in performance or perfection, but by endurance.”

“Our loyalty to God is determined by our faith in His promises, particularly when it requires waiting through bleak and troubled times!”

Our journey these past 5 years has been filled with days of doubt sometimes, but we know we have been given the opportunity to come full circle back to the place that we call home! Not only physically, but in our hearts as well!

We are not only grateful for the lessons we have been learning but for Gods love and PROVIDENCE over our lives!

” Great is thy faithfulness O God my Father, there is no shadow of turning from Thee! All I have needed thy Hand hath provided, Great is thy faithfulness Lord unto me! ”

Quotes are taken from Daily In His Presence