Fall hits, and I have a strong urge to utilize apples in all of my cooking. I put apples in my salads, in grilled cheese sandwiches and yesterday I tried it in my bread.

This apple and honey challah is reminiscent of the iconic apple pie. The tiny pieces of apple nestled into the dough make the surrounding bread ever so slightly syrupy and you taste the flavor of the honey more than an overt sweetness. I used Bernard's Acadiana honey (harvested in Breaux Bridge) and two enormous honeycrisp apples. The recipe calls for two apples, but smaller ones would be best because the pieces were falling out left and right while braiding the loaf.

But don't plan on making this if you're short on time. The dough has to rest for a total of 2 1/2 hours (with intermittent kneading and braiding) plus baking for 45-50 minutes — but don't be deterred. It's worth the wait.

It makes an enormous loaf, so slice it up to eat with any meal during the week or as a snack with some butter and apple cider. The recipe is from a favorite recipe website of mine, foodgawker.com. It's a compilation of all the best recipes available on the Internet, and each beautiful photograph brings you to the original food blog that posted it — in this case, it's smittenkitchen.com. The original recipe also calls for sprinkled coarse sugar on top, but I didn't feel that it was really necessary. It also recommends squirting lemon juice on the apples to keep them from browning, but I didn't encounter a problem with that, either.

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