Apple Cake, Confiture de Lait, and Sap Boats

I recently was given a bag of apples from a friend's tree that hadn't been sprayed and tended, which meant I needed to find a recipe to cook an apple dessert.  Yesterday, I stumbled upon this One Bowl Apple Cake recipe on the blog maya*made, that looked perfect.  It was so easy and so delicious that I highly recommend the recipe.

This is the cake in all its yumminess after I took it out of the oven,

but the recipe says to make it even yummier by sprinkling icing sugar on top before serving.  Who am I to not follow directions?

We served it with confiture de lait given to us by our French visitors this summer.  I absolutely fell in love the with the jar and the brown gingham lid.   Confiture de lait is a very thick, sweet, carmalized sauce that is, apparently, a lot like the South American dessert dulce de leche.  We drizzled it on the cake and vanilla ice cream and it was delicious.  Confiture de lait is a speciality of Normandy which is where our guests are from.  We weren't really sure if that is how you are to eat it, but it tasted fantastic with the apple cake. 

I just had to add this little tidbit of fun.  Yesterday we went to a nearby park that has a pond and my daughter suggested we make sap boats.  You take a small twig and stick one end in sap from an evergreen tree.  Then when you drop it into water, the sap dissolves and pushes the stick along.  It was truly amazing to see the stick wiggling around in the water.  That's just how exciting we are around here.