I’m always looking for new recipes and yesterday my friend Kris passed along a link to a tasty-looking one from King Arthur Flour for Apple Upside Down Cake. My plan had been to make the cake and recommend the link to you….and I DO recommend this recipe to you. But I have to confess that I never made it past the caramel sauce.
See, I thought I’d see how the caramel sauce went together for that Apple Upside Down Cake and it was EASY. And delicious! I loved the little pinch of cinnamon and the apple juice. WOW. In fact, the sauce just disappeared. Everyone loved it. Gone. I wasn’t even looking for a new caramel sauce recipe because my go-to Homemade Caramel Sauce is so awesome, but WOW.
So today I started over; one thing led to another as it often does when I’m left unsupervised in the kitchen…and it turned out even better! Instead of just a little cinnamon, I tweaked the quantities a little and added all the pumpkin pie spices and ohmygoodness, it was incredible! And EASY! This is a great fall treat that goes well with all those autumn-y desserts.
Pumpkin Pie Caramel Sauce
In a medium-sized saucepan, combine:
- 5 T. butter
- 1 c. brown sugar
- 3 T. apple juice concentrate
- 1/4 t. ground cinnamon
- 1/8 t. ground cloves
- 1/8 t. ground ginger
- 1/8 t. ground allspice
- 1/2 c. light corn syrup
Stir ingredients together while they’re melting.
Bring to a boil, cook for 1 minute and remove from heat.
One of my sons suggested that I try to come up with a substitute for the corn syrup since most people these days have a hate-hate relationship with the stuff. I’ve read (in that King Arthur Flour recipe I linked to earlier, that maple syrup will work as a substitute but will affect the flavor. You can use honey but it will burn easily. I plan to test this recipe with a little local molasses (or sorghum syrup) to see if that will work.
We dipped apple slices in this delicious caramel sauce. The tartness of the apples is a perfect foil for the sweetness of the caramel sauce. The spices and the apple juice give this caramel sauce a whole new twist. This sauce will also go over vanilla ice cream verrrrry smoothly.
This sauce is going to be very versatile if I can keep it in the house long enough to experiment with it!
And in the meantime, I’ll make some time to try out that Apple Upside Down Cake.
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Corn syrup and High Fructose Corn Syrup are NOT the same thing. HFCS has been modified and is the bad one. As far as I know corn syrup is just sugar to our bodies- just as honey would be.