Law Enforcement Appreciation Day and Cakes

On Wednesday we baked cake, lots and lots of cake!  January 9th is Law Enforcement Appreciation Day.  My family and I like to take goodies around to the local law enforcement in memory of my stepdad Deputy Clifford E. Dicker who was killed in 1994 by a 15 year old boy.

We usually take cookies and/or fudge of various types and deliver them to the surrounding offices.

Fudge 

Cookies

This year, we decided to take them cakes instead.  I found a wonderful recipe for a fruit bread that we turned into a delicious applesauce spice cake for 9 cakes and tweaked it to make 3 more with mandarin oranges, pineapple and coconut.

To make the applesauce spice cakes we followed her recipe exactly using applesauce and then added in 5 tsp of pumpkin spice, I also added in some cranberries for 3 cakes and English walnuts to all of them.

For the Mandarin/Pineapple/Coconut Cakes we followed the recipe exactly but changed out the 5 cups of applesauce to a mixture of 5 cups of canned mandarin oranges and pineapple that had been drained and pulsed in the food processor, then added in a bag of unsweetened coconut.  The only thing I think I would do differently with this cake would be to do the oranges and pineapple earlier and allow it to drain after pulsing it to get out some more of the liquid and it was a very heavy cake, but it sure was delicious.

We delivered to a total of 8 local law enforcement offices that included state, county and town offices and were thanked by each one of them for remembering them on this day of appreciation.