This is a very easy and delicious way to enjoy apples!

Spiced Caramel Apple Cake a la RameyLady

Original Recipe is from CHOW via Punchfork
If you follow the original, this cake is entirely dairy-free.
I’m going to tweak it here according to what I’m doing….mostly using dairy and spices:
INGREDIENT LIST AT BOTTOM

Preheat oven to 375.
Butter a 8×8 or 9×9 pan really well. I use a 9×9 Pampered Chef stoneware pan and I’ve never had trouble getting this cake out of the pan. If you’re using glass or metal, butter that sucker up.

Slice down 1-2 apples. You need about 32 good slices, about 1/4 inch thick. 
Sprinkle with some lemon juice if you don’t want them to turn brown.

Dig out some chopped nuts if that’s your thing.  You’ll need them later.

Make the cake batter — I use my KitchenAid stand mixer
:
Cream together….
1/2 cup softened butter (1 stick) or beat the tar out of a cold stick;
1 cup brown sugar.

Mix in
2 eggs, one at a time
1 tsp vanilla

Sift together in a separate bowl
1 and 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 Tbs cinnamon
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp nutmeg
shot of ground ginger if you want
1 tsp salt

Stir in and alternate:
the dry mixture
1/4 cup milk

Make the caramel in a heavy-bottomed pan on the stovetop:
Melt 1 stick of butter over medium heat.
Stir in 2/3 cup of brown sugar, stirring until it doesn’t feel really grainy and it’s combined (I’ve noticed this is a very buttery caramel, so if you have a tiny later of butter on top, you didn’t mess up)
Once that’s combined, add 1/2 tsp vanilla plus a dash of any apple-happy spice you like — I use cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg & roasted ginger.
Stir until smooth.

Pour the caramel into the bottom of your buttered pan.
 
Arrange the apples in a layer on top of the caramel.
If you like nuts, sprinkle them on top right now.

Smooth the prepared batter carefully onto the apple layer — I drop by big spoonfulls and then use an offset spatula to smooth it out like cake icing.

Bake 40-45 min or until toothpick in center comes out clean.

Cool about 5 min, then invert onto a platter to serve (it’s great warm or cold).  Ice cream is a natural partner.

I recommend pulling this from the pan pretty quickly, though I’m about to take this cake in the stoneware to a friend’s house an hour away, so I’ll post an update if that works out ok.  It’d be messy to transport it already out of the pan, so we’re gonna just hope.

FULL INGREDIENTS

For the Caramel & top:
2-3 apples, sliced 1/4 thick and sprinkled with lemon juice (optional)
1 cup chopped nuts, optional
1 stick butter (1/2 cup)
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp apple pie spice or assorted apple-y spices

For the cake:
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) — very soft or very beaten
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 Tbs apple pie spice or combo of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, etc)
1/4 cup milk

[By the way, this post has absolutely nothing to do with Erskine.... the thought comes because of a discussion I read on Facebook.]

I’m getting to where it’s nearly impossible for me to envision teaching without seeing it as relational. 

I was reading a discussion about college faculty and their communication methods with students. Of course, people vary in the way they prefer to engage others, and the faculty/student relationship adds another wrinkle to that question.  Most teachers today ban Facebook requests from students, limit their availability via text or cell phone, and prefer to shepherd student interactions into clearly-defined spaces like office hours.

It bothers me that many college faculty are even less approachable than, say, a public high school teacher.  You’d think that adult students would have even more of a “right” to expect that a professor would be personally engaged, but it seems that our modern academies do not think so.  Some of them, at least. 

I realize that time is a limited and valuable resource, one that many education professionals must guard jealously to avoid overload. Oh believe me, I remember.  For the first time in 10 years I’m not heading home every night to another 2 or 3 hours of work.  So I totally get why teachers want to guard their time from intrusion by the rug-rats they’re teaching during the day. And yes, “rug-rat” can refer to college freshmen. lol 

Teaching is a highly social activity, one that drains you of  your ability to give attention to other human beings. My desire to know other people and engage them hit a low point during the school years and bobbed back up over the summer when suddenly I had the emotional energy again to build relationships.

(By the way, I understand that enforcing office hours and communication channels do function as a fence that allows people to get work done when they don’t want to be disturbed. But do you really need a fence around EVERY other hour of your life?)

But I ramble.

My point is this:
If you don’t see teaching as a relational activity, then why are you in it?

If teaching (college or high school or whatever) is mere information-transfer, then you have no business demanding that other human beings reorganize their schedules to put themselves in the same geographical location as you. A web site, textbook, or online course should replace you.

Even if we acknowledge that much teaching involves the transfer of skills, and mentoring students into certain ways of doing — say, to play the violin or make a flambe or fix the fuel injectors or argue a case before a judge — I still question whether any teacher has the right to treat teaching like an object which can be dropped at will (especially at 5pm) and picked up again with any given student, on cue, as if the factory bell had rung to call everyone to the assembly line.

Very little good can happen to a human being outside of a relationship.

Andy Jones, who is on staff at the Chalmers Center for Economic Development at Covenant College (a non-profit dedicated to equipping churches to help the poor without hurting the poor in the process) spoke in chapel here at Erskine on Tuesday.  One line from his sermon stood out to me:

“When humans flourish, it is because of positive relationships.”

He said this while explaining that poverty is not an issue of monetary disadvantage; poverty (as described by the poor themselves) is a state of being an outcast, living outside the boundaries of normal human society. To fix poverty, you have to repair the relationships (to God, society, family, and one’s self).

Professors and teachers must recognize that their value to their students lies NOT in their vast knowledge which they share in lecture form. 

It is not even in their ability to mentor a student from apprentice to mastery of a skill.

The power of an educator lies solely in his/her ability to develop meaningful relationships with students, relationships that lead to students flourishing as human beings because of the investment of the teacher on a personal, meaningful level.

And that, my friends, will not be a work limited to 8am-5pm.  You can shut your door to Facebook friend requests, text messages, cell phone exchanges, and even human contact outside of office hours and classroom time … but I question your value to the educational profession.  Yes, very learned people can add knowledge to a subject discipline…. but Kingdom work takes place in hearts more than in journal articles.