Diet Soda Apple Cobbler

I got a lot of apples in my Bountiful Basket again. It's not that I don't like apples, but to get through them all I'd have to eat like two a day and I don't like them THAT much. I do, however, love any dessert that includes apples. Apple pie, apple crisp, apple cobbler...the problem with that is my husband doesn't like baked fruit. I know, he's a weirdo. Luckily, my in-laws came over for dinner last night so I had someone to help me eat an apple dessert!

Since I started back on Weight Watchers last month, I've made a couple cakes with diet soda. All you do is mix a cake mix with a can of diet soda and bake it. I've tried lemon cake with diet lemon-lime soda and devils food cake with diet cherry cola. They were both good! When my family goes camping, they make cobbler in the dutch oven with diet soda, but they use canned pie filling. I didn't want to do that because it wouldn't use up my apples, plus it would have added sugar, which means the points value for the fruit would no longer be zero. I saw another recipe on Pinterest that used frozen fruit. That wouldn't work either, and besides, a lot of people complained that the frozen fruit made it watery on the bottom. Unhappy with my recipe options, I decided to wing it. It worked! I'm pretty sure you could use any fruit you wanted to. Cherries would be a pain because you'd have to take the pit out of all of them, but I'm thinking cherries with devils food cake mix and diet cherry cola would be freaking awesome...

Diet Soda Apple Cobbler

10 apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
apple pie spice to taste (I'm guessing I used 1-2 tsp. but I really don't know)
1 (18.25 oz.) box yellow cake mix, unprepared
1 (16 oz.) bottle diet lemon-lime soda

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place apples in 13x9 pan sprayed with cooking spray. Sprinkle with apple pie spice. Spread dry cake mix evenly over apples. Pour soda over cake mix, trying to cover as much cake mix as you can (any cake mix that doesn't get wet won't cook and will remain dry). Bake for 50-60 minutes or until toothpick inserted just into cake part comes out clean (if you poke the toothpick all the way into the apple mixture it will never come out clean). I highly recommend serving with vanilla ice cream!