After leaving the apple orchard with $44 dollars worth of apples, you are probably wondering, what happened to the apples?

Good question. I quickly went to work on getting rid of them all.

Luckily Jack had snack week the very next day, so we sent him in with 30 apples.

Next I put 9 in an apple pie. It was very pretty but I forgot to take a picture. I thought about it a few days later but it was already gone. It was also very tasty.

Next I made apple sauce in the slow cooker.

It required about 14 apples, if you add the diced apples with the apples I blended and HAND STRAINED to get apple juice. (I don’t have a juicer.)

It was the most delicious apple sauce I had ever tasted. I used it on these zucchini cakes.

Sometimes I ate it with greek yogurt too.

Another 6 apples were used to make an apple tart.

I cheated, that’s store bought puff pastry. I just sliced apples then sprinkled with sugar, dotted with butter and baked. When it looked done I took them out and brushed them with apricot jam.

Two were sent to Ben’s school for his apple tasting experiment.

More were sent in school lunches with peanut butter dip.

Seriously at this point I feel like I am the apple queen. I mean, look how many clever and delicious ways I’ve managed to make my family and friends eat all these apples! I was so confident.

Until I looked in the apple orchard bags.

I still had HALF LEFT!

HALF! What was I going to do with another whole bag?

I needed more recipes that used at least 10 apples or more.

I googled my way into making caramel apples next.

I found a recipe with 5 stars that I was sure would be a winner. How could sugar, corn syrup, heavy cream with some salt possibly go wrong?

All you do is boil it all together then let it cool a bit, dip the apples and add toppings. That would be a ton of fun for the older kids!

I got it all set up on this rainy Saturday afternoon…

Doesn’t this look like fun? I couldn’t wait to have a blast with the kids.

Well, unfortunately it was not fun. It was messy, and sticky, and the caramel didn’t stick to the apples. Neither did the toppings. Next thing I knew  the kids were upset that they didn’t look like the store bought ones, and I was upset that I couldn’t find a single funny thing about it. Are these the ugliest caramel apples you’ve ever seen or what?

The toppings are on top because I had to keep pulling them off the bottom and sticking them on top.

It reminded me of the last time I tried to work with a melted dipping type topping. Cake pops.

Remind me not to work with melting and dipping things again. I’m terrible at is.

Okay, I’d better get back to googling. This defeat will not make me forget I need to finish that last bag of apples!