Hi there!  Happy Friday to you!  Yay!  I’m so glad that it’s Friday.  It’s been a long and stressful week.  I feel like this week took forever to go by.  I apologize for not posting yesterday.  I was really busy and wasn’t having a very good day.  I appreciate all of your sweet comments regarding our wedding reception .  I will be posting more details about our wedding in an additional post and like I mentioned before, then I will finally be recapping our honeymoon.  I cannot wait to talk about our honeymoon because we traveled to Antigua and a lot of people don’t know much about that island and I want to give it the credit that it deserves.  So definitely stay tuned for that!  What are you doing this weekend?  I don’t really have anything planned for this weekend except for getting my oil changed tomorrow morning.  I’m also hoping to organize the house the bit and maybe order some of our wedding pictures and start a wedding album.  That is about it for me.  Hurricane Sandy is supposed to head straight towards Philadelphia so I’m not sure what we are going to do about that.  I have off from work on Monday to go to a doctor’s appointment.  So as long as I can get to the appointment, I’ll be happy.

Since I didn’t post yesterday, I’ll discuss what I did on Thursday.  On Thursday after work, I picked up Melissa and went to Target to look around and get a few things that I needed.  We went back to her house and cooked for a little while and then I played with Oliver.  He hasn’t made an appearance since everything that happened with him .  I think it’s time he makes an appearance on the blog.  I missed seeing his furry adorable face.

Oliver!

I said something funny to make his head tilt

I love seeing his smiling face.  You would have never known everything that he went through if you didn’t know him.  He is completely back to normal and in happy spirits.  I’m so glad!  He really scared us there for a while.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had a stressful and long day.  When I got home, I knew that I needed to do something that would relax me and take my mind off things.  I knew I had to bake something.  I had seen a recipe for an Apple Cake on Kristin’s blog and I knew that one day I would have to try it.  Mike and I recently purchased a bundt pan and I had all the ingredients so this was the cake to make!  I’ve never made a bundt cake before so I was pretty nervous about how it was going to turn out.  I followed the recipe and hoped for the best.

Apple Cake from Iowa Girl Eats

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup no sugar added applesauce (**I used a single serve container of applesauce)
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-3 Granny Smith apples, cored and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (3 cups total)
1/4 cup powdered sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Spray a Bundt pan with nonstick spray then set aside.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, beat butter, vegetable oil, and sugar until pale yellow, about 2 minutes. Add applesauce then beat to combine. Add eggs one at a time, beating until combined before adding the next egg. Add vanilla then beat to combine.
In a separate bowl, stir together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Remove 2 Tablespoons of flour mixture then toss with cubed apples. Add remaining dry ingredients to wet ingredients in three batches, mixing until just combined before adding the next batch, then fold in apples.
Pour batter into prepared Bundt pan and bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a wooden skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Check cake at 20 minutes – if top is turning too brown, place a sheet of non-stick sprayed tin foil on top. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan then run a knife along the inner rim and invert cake onto a wire rack to cool completely. Garnish cooled cake with powdered sugar.

Ingredients