{an apple pie/caramel cheesecake hybrid}

I hate the fact that I feel the need to preface this post with a disclaimer: I am not a food blogger. I am not a photographer. I am not good at anything, and I'm on my knees in the dirt asking you to not judge me. 

It used to be that people could blog about whatever they wanted, like, "Look what I did/made/took a picture of/listened to/watched/thought of/wrote..." and it was cool. (Not cool cool. Cool in the sense that you didn't tell a single soul in real life that you had a blog because it was literally the nerdiest ((not in a good way)) thing you could possibly do.) Now you have to have a "niche" and buy a "domain" and write for an "audience" and go to a "conference" to learn about "monetizing" and buy an expensive "camera" and despite all your best efforts you'll probably still end up on "GOMI".

Welp.

I'm about to blog about food. Using pictures that I took with my broken point and shoot. And this post is not sponsored by anyone other than my husband, who bought the apples.

For Thanksgiving this year, I was on dessert duty. I picked it. Dessert duty, I mean. When given the choice, I always pick dessert duty, because then I can make a cheesecake. When else am I going to make a cheesecake? And I decided to go all out. Because when you make, like, one cheesecake a century, you have to go all out when you do.

By "go all out" though, I don't mean money-wise or effort-wise. I only really mean taste-wise and appearance-wise.

So I decided what I wanted to make (an apple pie/caramel cheesecake hybrid, because I felt a little guilty for not making a traditional apple pie) and did what I always do: I hit up Pinterest. I needed a gluten-free crust, so I searched "easy delicious fast good gluten-free cheesecake crust" and I found THIS crust which uses pecans instead of graham crackers (and really was easy, delicious, fast, and good). Then I searched "best easiest caramel cheesecake ever" and found THIS which I only had to modify slightly for the filling. And last but not least I searched, "really cool apple pie" and found THIS, which looks awesome but is probably the easiest thing ever. (I didn't follow the recipe, just made kind of a quick apple pie filling with crazy amounts of butter and sugar and used the picture for the design.)

There you have it: I am lazy, but resourceful.

But the point is not that.

The point is that I made this, and it was good: