Turn Your Apple Pie Into A Delicious Cake With One Store-Bought Staple

Apple pie is among the most iconic desserts to ring in the fall. While you can buy a premade pie shell at the grocery store, it just takes one store-bought staple to transform apple pie into a delicious cake. Store-bought cake mix is a tasty alternative to pie crust for a fluffy base to a spiced apple filling mixture. You'll get the wonderful taste of apple pie and vanilla with a novel and comforting contrast of tender cooked apples to a fluffy, airy cake crumb. Plus, you can customize the recipe with additional ingredients like nuts, oats, or crumbled toppings.

To make an apple cake, prepare the cake mix and apple filling separately. You can bolster the white cake mix with milk, butter, and whipped egg whites instead of the water and oil it typically calls for. In addition to enhancing flavor with dairy richness, the egg whites will help the batter rise and keep the apples from sinking to the bottom of the baking pan.

After mixing the cake mix and stirring lemon juice, spices, and sugar in with your apples, you're ready to assemble and bake your cake. Pour the cake into a buttered or greased baking pan, top it with the apple mixture and any other topping that you have in mind, and bake the cake at 350 degrees for around 50 minutes. Cover the cake with tin foil for 40 of the 50 minutes in the oven to keep the cake moist.

White cake mix is a subtle pairing to help the apples and spices shine, but yellow cake mix is an equally delicious option that's slightly richer. You can add baking spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove to white or yellow cake mix. Other cake mix flavors like spice cake, carrot cake, and butter pecan would also pair well with apple pie topping. Granny smith apples are a classic choice for apple pie cake because they balance the sweetness of dessert with tartness. But you could also follow our recommendation for the best way to make apple pie by adding more than one type of apple.

Enrich your apple pie filling with brown sugar instead of white sugar for a caramelized taste. You can stir toasted pecans, walnuts, or hazelnuts in with the brown sugar and cinnamon apple filling for a pop of crunch and nuttiness. For an even more elaborate topping, make a nut streusel with vanilla, brown sugar, butter, flour, and cinnamon.

Drizzle your apple cake with this salted caramel sauce once it's cooled. Add an apple-crumble topping by blending flour, brown sugar and butter into crumbles to sprinkle over the apple topping. You can also add chopped nuts and shredded coconut to the cake batter to get texture throughout the crumb. Serve apple cake with the same classic accompaniments you'd enjoy with apple pie, like whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.