Today is a very special day. The kind of day that you can dress up like a princess and eat cake and ice cream for breakfast!!

Today is Pa’s Birthday! 🙂

This morning we all sat down to a nice breakfast of birthday cake and ice cream and had a mini-birthday celebration for our beloved Pa. As you can tell my children watch way too much Little House On The Prairie. Pa is the new word for Daddy around here. It is actually very cute to hear the girls call us Ma and Pa.

Just as you can’t have soup without bread, you can’t have cake without ice cream. Those are both terrible crimes! So I whipped up big bowl of banana soft serve this morning to go with the cake.

I promise that my husband didn’t really just turn 15. I also promise that is not my man hand.

Birthdays just aren’t birthdays without a homemade cake and I wanted to make my hubby’s birthday special, so I got busy last night baking a healthy Apple Cinnamon Coffee Cake cake. Sugar-free and completely guilt-free. So much so that you can even have it for breakfast! 😉

Spelt Apple Cinnamon Coffee Cake with Maple Pecan Topping

Makes one 8 x 8 cake

Ingredients

• 2 cups spelt flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2/3 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup sunflower oil
• 1/3 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 medium apples, peeled and diced (2 cups)

Maple Pecan Topping

• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 cup sunflower oil
• 1/4 cup spelt flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 3/4 cup pecan pieces

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Prepare the Maple Pecan Topping by whisking all the topping ingredients together in a small mixing bowl.
3. In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sea salt and cinnamon.
4. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, sunflower oil, milk, applesauce and vanilla. Add the wet mixture to the dry ingredients in the medium mixing bowl and lightly mix until just combined. Gently fold in the diced apples.
5. Pour the batter into a non-stick 8 x 8 pan. Spread the maple pecan topping evenly over the cake batter and bake for 35-40 minutes. The cake is done when you poke it with a toothpick and it comes out clean.

This cake is really great! It is not too sweet, so it is perfect to have anytime (we had it for breakfast after all). It is especially great with a nice hot cup of coffee. 🙂

If you haven’t already noticed, the flash is broken on my camera (and has been for months). It takes beautiful pictures in daylight, but when the sun goes down my pictures turn out completely dark and unbalanced in every way. When I post the darker pictures, I post them after they have undergone severe editing (like the first one of Autumn). At least my food pics turn out great in the sunlight! Just wanted to let you know that I am not a crappy photographer.

If you aren’t counting, there are now 20 days until Christmas Eve and 21 days until Christmas Day. I would know, I hear about it everyday and The Best Christmas Album Ever is still playing non-stop all day long, from the time the girls jump out of their beds, until the time I tuck them back in.

I too am looking forward to Christmas and have finished a little bit of my baking (recipes to come). I am really putting a lot of effort into it this year. I hope all of my efforts will pay off and that Santa will appreciate my cookies. I really need a new camera! 😉