Apple Spice Cake with Caramel Sauce

Fall is my favorite time of the year. Football season begins and the chill in the air brings out the beautiful fall foliage. It means the holidays are just around the corner and the foods and flavors of the season are the best. This dessert (or breakfast if you wish) has many of those fall flavors that I love like apples, cinnamon and caramel. I even baked it in the Fall Harvest Bundt Pan that I picked up from Williams-Sonoma last year to make it even more festive!

The cake is from the King Arthur Flour recipe for Apple-Spice Cake. I did not use the cherry juice concentrate nor the Cake Enhancer and I chose to use pecans instead of walnuts and it still turned out wonderful. I also decided to make a caramel sauce for the cake instead of using the glaze from the recipe. Topped with a little whipped cream and served with a pumpkin spice latte and I think I could be in heaven.

Caramel Sauce
makes ~1 1/2 cups

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
3/4 cup heavy cream
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon fleur de sel

In a 2-qt saucepan, combine the sugar, water and corn syrup and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Boil over medium high heat until the syrup is deep amber in color, about 8 minutes. Remove the saucepan from the heat and carefully whisk in the cream, butter and salt. Let the caramel cool to room temperature. Sauce will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Pita Bread

I know it's been a while since I've posted. I haven't stopped cooking, I just haven't been as good about taking photos of the food. But when I made homemade pita bread for the first time today, they just looked too good not to take a picture of and share. Of course, since pita is a bread, I went to King Arthur Flour's website for the recipe.

They were surprisingly easy to make and turned out much better than what you get from the store. I followed their recipe as written and used instant yeast, which is the only yeast I bake with since it doesn't require "proofing". I placed the rolled pitas and parchment and baking them on a half sheet pan. I was able to fit three on the pan so it took three batches to bake off all eight pitas. All but one of my pitas "popped".

While good on their own, I'm looking forward to stuffing them with balsamic chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and lettuce for lunch. They would also be great with hummus too.

Stuffed Tomatoes & Risotto with Turnips and Bacon

For this meal, we grilled some beautiful rib eye steaks from Costco (see my Perfect Grilled Steak post on how we do that) along with Stuffed Tomatoes & Risotto with Turnips and Bacon. The tomatoes were leftover from last week and the turnips were in this week's AHO box. For the tomatoes I used Sunny Anderson's recipe found here. I used panko bread crumbs and the last of the basil from our herb garden this year. The Risotto with Turnips and Bacon recipe is from Gourmet magazine. I found the it using the awesome Epicurious iPad app. We really liked the way that the spicy turnip flavor was mellowed out by the creamy risotto. And bacon, well doesn't it make everything better?!

Broiled Salmon with Roasted Tomato and Lemon Vinaigrette and Bok Choy

This week my AHO box had fresh marjoram in it. I have never cooked with marjoram, so as I was looking around the Internet I stumbled upon this recipe from Emeril on the Food Network website. The irony is that tomatoes and bok choy also came in this week's box and we had a salmon fillet in the freezer from my father-in-law's fishing trip to Alaska that we wanted to use. I'm not much of a fish eater and I usually shy away from Emeril's recipes because most of them are involved and time consuming, this one was quick, easy and turned out amazing! I used four regular tomatoes, seeded and chopped, and one full sized bok choy. If you are feeding four, you need would need two full sized bok choy, but for the two of us one was fine. The lemon in this dish cut the richness of the salmon and the marjoram added a subtle, yet elegant freshness to the dish.

Easy Chicken and Dumplings

Few things are more comforting that a bowl of chicken and dumplings, but it's tough to find the time to make the traditional version on a week night. This Rachael Ray recipe can be made in 30 minutes and is almost as good as my mom's. I added 2 tsp of fresh thyme to the biscuit mix because I love the flavor of fresh thyme with chicken.

Fig Salsa

This Fig Salsa recipe is courtesy of AHO. We've received several pints of figs over the past few months and this is my favorite way to use them! I used one serrano pepper with seeds instead of two jalapeno without seeds, which gave it a little more heat. We ate much of the salsa with tortilla chips. We also had it on grilled chicken breasts, which was awesome. This salsa's got heat and sweet and the mint really brightens it up.

Rosemary-Garlic Steaks with Potato Salad Fra Diavolo

This meal from Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals Summer Simplicity episode is the perfect farewell to summer. The arugula, tomatoes and Parmigiano-Reggiano salad cut through the richness of the Rosemary-Garlic Steaks. The Potato Salad Fra Diavolo, which is now my husand's favorite potato salad, has a strong smokiness that pairs perfectly with a big, bold Syrah. This is a great meal to have out on the patio or anytime you're craving the smokey, bold flavors of summer.