Apple Cake in an Iron Skillet: a New Year's success!

Way back, when we were making preparations to celebrate New Year's Eve of 2010, I discovered a recipe listed on Pioneer Woman Cooks and just couldn't pass it up.  PW makes everything she cooks look irresistible.  But there was something about this gooey, sticky, warm, comforting apple cake that needed to be baked, presented, and eaten that night after our friends Erin and Ted (our house's previous owners) fed us all steak and chicken fajitas.  Shhh, stop thinking that an apple cake with vanilla ice cream sounds nasty after stuffing cheese dip and spicy chicken fajitas in your face-hole.  It was a warm and sweet and light and delicious finishing touch after dinner and before silly champagne toasts that seemed to go on for an hour, in a good way.

So, needless to say, I called Erin in the early afternoon of New Year's Eve and offered to bring dessert, tempting her with the gooey-ness and apple-ness and sticky-ness that this recipe described.  She sounded genuinely excited, so I got prepared ASAP.  The only ingredient I didn't already have in the pantry was some tart apples.  Actually, I had two apples, but they had gone a little shrively since my every-year's winter obsession with clementines agreed to let them die a slow death on the kitchen counter.  Since I needed more than two apples, and since the apples in the cake were going to be eaten, I scooped Carlton up, squished him into the car with me, and we headed to the grocery store for a bag-o-Grannies.

Then I got started.  Melt the butter, all 1.75 sticks of it.

(Believe me, it really, really, really was worth all that butter. Really.)

While the butter melted, I prepped my apple for the cake batter:

(By the way, if you don't own a ceramic knife, I strongly recommend making the investment.)

Then, I added my sectioned apples to the skillet:

(Apples cooked in loads of butter? Okay, where do I bite?!?)

Wait, I feel like I forgot something. Oh yeah, the sugar!

(What's that you say? Apples cooked in loads of butter and shovels of sugar? Double-OKAY!!!)

Sugar and butter melted together into a syrup while the apples seasoned it and softened in the process:

(Holy guacamole, the house now smells like pure sin.  Or, pure Heaven.  Either way, I'm lovin' it.)

While the apples fried/sauteed/tempted me to gobble one up in a heartbeat with no reservation about burning the fool out of my mouth, I made the cake batter in my beloved stand mixer in classic white:

(Would it really be worth it to eat one of those apples at this point? I'll save my mouth the blisters and burns and lick the cake beaters, spoon, and bowl per The Pioneer Woman's instructions instead.)

Once the apples were fork-tender, I plopped the batter on one giant spoonful at a time like a good recipe-follower would do. Instead of plopping on top of the apples like hers seemed to do, mine kinda plopped into the mixture. I just scooped it back up on top of the apples and smoothed it a little:

(I still don't know how I resisted the apples in the skillet. To this day, I think the smell is stuck in my nose. Or, it was just such a good smell that I remember it that vividly. Either way, yummo.)

This was the finished product before I flipped it onto a large serving platter.  It came out of my skillet in one piece with no stragglers left behind, what an accidental accomplishment!

(Still an enormous amount of willpower here, I waited until after dinner at Ted and Erin's house to share the gooey, cakey, appley goodness with everyone else.)

While I didn't get a picture of the final cake flipped out of the skillet on my platter (oy, tragedy!), I did get a shot of some of us (the girls of the night, minus one girl, plus one guy) after the warm dessert, along with vanilla ice cream (a MUST with this one, y'all), had been devoured:

Happy faces for a Happy New Year!