Apple Spice Cake

This post was sponsored by Juicy Juice® through their partnership with POPSUGAR. While I was compensated by POPSUGAR to write a post about Juicy Juice®, all opinions are my own.

This Apple Spice Cake recipe filled with chunks of apples and topped with a cinnamon cream cheese frosting. It is the perfect fall dessert.

Fall is quickly approaching. Pinterest is full of fall crafts, Halloween decor, pictures of falling leaves, and apple recipes. As much as I love the sunshine in the summer, the crisp air of fall is better. Sadly, those moderate temperatures don’t last long around here so we have to enjoy fall while we have it! Fall baking is the best. I love all of the spices, and apple desserts, tarts, pies, dumplings, and cake are at the top of my baking list.

Last week Melinda and I received a box full of goodies from Juicy Juice®. We love their products; Juicy Juice® has 16 different flavors and 8 oz of Juicy Juice® equals one cup of fruit. Melinda puts them in her kids’ lunches, and I always have them on hand when my niece and nephews are visiting. When Juicy Juice® asked us to try out one of their recipes I was excited. I hadn’t realized there were Juicy Juice® recipes on their website, but I’m so glad I found them because this Apple Spice Cake was calling my name.

This cake has it all: apple pieces that have been cooked in Juicy Juice® 100% Apple Juice, spice cake, and a cinnamon cream cheese frosting. This thing smells like heaven while it is baking, filling the whole house with the scent of cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking apples. It tastes even better. Best part, it is a simple recipe using a boxed spice cake mix and cream cheese frosting, with a few simple additions that take them to the next level.

The first step was using Juicy Juice® Apple Juice to re-hydrate sliced, dried apples. We combined the dried apples and apple juice in a small saucepan and brought it to a boil, letting the apples cook until all of the juice had evaporated. We were left with soft, sweet apples to use in the cake.

Then it was just a matter of mixing together the cake mix, water, eggs and applesauce in a mixing bowl and folding in the apples. The recipe calls for a 13×9 pan but we used a Bundt pan. It cooked at exactly the same temperature and for the same amount of time and came out perfectly.

We could have stopped there, that cake smelled so good, but the recipe called for a cinnamon cream cheese frosting that we couldn’t bring ourselves to skip! I had never thought of mixing cinnamon into a container of cream cheese frosting to give it a little something extra, but I’ll definitely be using that trick again. The frosting was the perfect complement to the cake, and possibly my favorite part, after the apple chunks. I love the taste of baked apples and cinnamon. Yum!

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What is your favorite apple dessert to make in the fall?