I really wanted to join in with the Great Bloggers Bake Off as soon as I saw people talking about it on my Twitter feed but life got in the way and I didn’t watch the first two episodes of the Great British Bake Off until it was too late to join in with the linky. But not this week!

This week I made sure I had it watched on Tuesday (granted on iPlayer at some silly hour, but I watched it) and after giggling my way through the great custard heist and being utterly awed by all the petit fours, I became determined to come up with something in time to join up.

Coincidentally, last Sunday my parents delivered a small mountain of apples to my door from their veritable orchard of a garden. I quickly set about dividing the heap up and handing out bulging bags of fruit to various friends but was still left with enough apples to feed an army and no clue what to do with them all.

I made apple loaf and a load of apple sauce and quickly decided I needed to invest in one of those funky apple corer/peeler/slicer thingummys. That purchased, I was ready to face the rest of the apple mountain.

Next I had to come up with something Bake Off inspired that I could make with my limited baking skills in my kitchen that still looks like a moving van recently threw up in it (we still aren’t unpacked).

I quickly decided trifle was probably my best bet – I couldn’t face the fiddly petit fours and wouldn’t know where to start making iles flottante, as delicious as they looked and sounded. There were no grand plans for pretty palm tree designs in my mind though – I just wanted it to look vaguely like a trifle should!

As it had to be apple themed I quickly decided that, with Autumn creeping up on us, toffee apple was the way to go. I used my whizzy piece of kit to core, peel and chop my apples into slices.

Then I simply threw them in a pan with some melted butter, mixed spice and brown sugar and set them to cooking gently to make my toffee apple fruit layer filling.

Then I mixed up a packet of Butterscotch Angel Delight in place of using custard (I’m not a big fan of cold custard and I admit it was a lazy way of bringing the toffee-ish flavour into the mix some more) and whipped up a pot of cream with a generous pinch of mixed spice to use as my other two layers.

With the fruit cooked and cooled I was ready to assemble. I cheated and bought trifle sponges – I am lazy – and I made a layer of these on the bottom of my bowl, covered them with a layer of Angel Delight, then a layer of apples and the tasty toffee/caramel sauce from the pan, then some whipped cream.

I then repeated all the layers again, doing my best to make it look pretty (and mostly failing).

Finally I sprinkled brown sugar liberally over the top and called it finished!

My first ever attempt at making trifle on my own – responses to it have generally been good aside from Tori not much liking the cold apple and Arthur reacting like I was trying to force feed him arsenic when I offered him a bowl of it.

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To see the other fab entries on the Great Bloggers Bake Off, nip over to The Crazy Kitchen or Mummy Mishaps to check out the other blogs on the Linky.