Several months ago, I bought a cookbook. In it were the most labor intensive recipes on planet earth. It was, of course, the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. While the cakes come out beautiful and they are absolutely delicious, I can’t get by the 32,896 steps it takes to get to that point.

I blogged about the Momofuku Birthday Cake back in May. It’s a whimsical little beauty and probably one of the most fun to look at cakes I have ever baked. Besides the delicious cake parts, there is a crunch that comes from the birthday crunchy bits that are baked separate from the cake that truly set this cake apart from other funfetti cakes. Since that cake, I have only made one more of the exact same thing, but have not attempted any other recipe out of the book.

That was until yesterday. Saturday we went apple picking with friends and came home with somewhere in the ballpark of 20 pounds of apples. I had big plans. I was going to make a whole bunch of apple pies and freeze them. Only, by the time we got home, I was exhausted. My husband put the apples in the refrigerator.

I woke up on Sunday and immediately pulled out the Momofuku cookbook, remembering that there was a recipe for an Apple Pie Layer Cake that I wanted to try. Let me be completely honest about how labor intensive these cakes are, at Momofuku Milk Bar they charge $38 for one of these 6 inch cakes. I would personally be hard pressed to part with one of these for that after the hours I put into making 15 separate recipes that will eventually add up to one tiny 6 inch cake. I started the cake at 9 am and I didn’t finish it until well after dark.

If you plan  to bake recipes out of the Momofuku Milkbar Cookbook know that you will dirty every dish in your kitchen. This is not even a slight exaggeration (I can hear those who have baked out of this chuckling, they know…). After 4 hours of working on this recipe I had ran out of dishes and was contemplating just going out and buying more over washing the huge mound of dishes that was taking up both sides of my  sink.

Twenty-Four hours, 32895 steps later, VOILA! We have cake! If you’re wondering what the comparison between this cake and a normal three layer cake, a normal cake has about 3 steps; cake, frosting, frost.

This Apple Pie Layer Cake is layered like this: Brown Butter Cake, Apple Cider, Liquid Cheese Cake, Pie crunchies, apples and so on and so forth. The frosting on top is a Pie crust frosting and it really tastes like pie crust (soo good).