Hummingbird Cake

I have a wee lil' confession:

I underestimated pecans. I really did.

For years I've been willfully ignorant of their existence. I paid attention to their more popular nutty friends: Sexy Almond, the one with the curves and the crunch; Friendly Walnut, chocolate's BFF; Popular Peanut, in high cookie, sandwich, and pad thai demand.

I admit, I was a little hung up over the way I should pronounce their name. Is it Pe-KAHN? Pee-Can? I wasn't sure, so I consulted the dictionary and found that both are perfectly fine. Methinks I should switch it up whenever I want. I'm that excited. (Just kidding.)

The point is...I added them to a wonderful Southern cake. I added them into cream cheese frosting.

I am now one happy fan.

Unfortunately, I started to run low on them, so I supplemented some walnuts to make up for the lack of volume...but the pecans still held their own. Honestly, I couldn't stop tasting the frosting. It was so delicious. 

The Hummingbird cake is full of bananas and pineapple and pecan goodness. It uses oil as its main source of fat, so it's a bit lighter than your typical butter cakes. This is a great centerpiece cake, a holiday dessert, or even a great weekend cake. You can bake a three-layer cake, like I did, or a huge sheet cake and go all out with the frosting.

The frosting is gooooooood. You've been warned ;)

Happy baking!

Golden Vanilla Cake

Hello everyone :)

Happy first post since forever ago, forever being exactly five months and four days, in this case :P

I thought I would find the time to update this blog, but after the first week of school, that idea went flat faster than the top of a souffle. Good idea. Great intentions. Horrible reality.

So, my Spring 2012 semester in a nutshell: Busy, busy, busy! 

Read a lot. Studied a lot. (Slept a little.) Dawdled a lot. Talked in class a lot. Annoyed my professors a lot. Drank a lot...of coffee. Had a heart-to-heart with various people in the most random places a lot. Avoided eye contact with people that I semi-know but not well enough to stop and say hi in order to avoid a greater form of awkwardness that would result from actually saying hi...a lot.

But most importantly, I learned a lot.

I learned, among many many things, that...

- Emory has a tiny campus, given that the "long ways" I take to avoid getting to work or class actually aren't that long.

- Korea's sense of national identity is complicated, conflicted, and very testy.

- You can survive on fewer hours of sleep than you thought you could. 

- I have the best cousins ever. And family understands you the way no one else can.

- When you have pulled an almost all-nighter, when you're in baggy shirt and sweats, when your hair is pulled back so your otherwise sexy glasses look really dorky, AND when you barely manage to walk into Starbucks for that crucial grande iced coffee an hour before your Soc midterm, you WILL run into a ridiculously hot Korean guy.

- Bagel with shmear is a college girl's best friend. And chocolate, too. Can't forget chocolate.

- Some people will always find reasons not to like you or be happy with you, and that's fine. Better to be one fake friend less than one fake friend more, in my opinion.

- Creative writing has a tendency to draw from within you your desires, fears, insecurities, vulnerabilities, and critical questions that drive who you are. And the real scary thing is that it often does this without you realizing it.

- God is, always and unequivocally, good.

:)