I made this cake for Thanksgiving, but it’s not exclusively a holiday dessert. It’s a wonderfully delicious any time you’re craving cake cake!

I looked up several apple cake recipes before landing on one from EatInEatOut. I tweaked it a bit & made it my own. The original recipe has nuts & is frosted with maple buttercream & pecans – it looks really amazing! I wanted to go the caramel route, so I decided on caramel buttercream & sauce with toffee chip garnish.

The caramel sauce & caramel buttercream recipes are amazing enough to merit their own post, but since I put it all together I wanted to give you guys the full picture.

Yep.

Seriously, SO GOOD!

The cake itself is really yummy even without frosting. With a few tweaks it would make a great apple muffin recipe. Hmm…

It also wasn’t terribly difficult! I used honeycrisp apples & the hardest part is probably dicing them, but I took a few shortcuts. I peeled them, used an apple slicer to slice & core them, then used a slap-chop to get little crunchy pieces of yum.

The batter before adding the apples is really thick! Reminded me of gingerbread cookie dough. But the apples are very moist & so once I stirred those in the batter was more cake-y than cookie-y.

The caramel sauce is amazing. I got it from The Pioneer Woman. Truly it’s more of a brown sugar sauce than caramel, but the taste & consistency are caramel-y enough for me! It reminds me a lot of sugary glaze part of the monkey bread muffins I’ve made previously – but much richer. At first I was worried it was too runny, but that was only because it was piping hot. So if you make this recipe & think the caramel sauce is too runny, it’s probably fine – just melted!

Of course, this cake also needed some buttercream. So I looked up the Wilton caramel buttercream recipe & just changed the proportions to suite my needs. The below recipe made just enough buttercream for this cake.

This cake is definitely worth all the work. It really wasn’t so bad. I put on some Christmas music, poured a glass of wine, & got to work while my husband kept me company in the kitchen.

Later on I frosted the cakes with the buttercream & put toffee chips all around the bottom. Then, I poured the caramel sauce all over it. This was one of the easiest cake decorating jobs ever. This cake is just as delicious as it is pretty!

Everyone loved it! The cake has a great apple flavor & the caramel sauce is slightly salty which offsets all the sweetness. The buttercream is creamy (well yeah, it should be, right?) & delicious.

All 3 of these recipes are winners. Put them together & they are unbelievable!

Apple Cake