frances cake, take two

my second frances cake outing was with angie.



angie and i had already confessed our mutual friend crushes and hung out before, but it had been a while, and frances cake seemed like the perfect reunion activity. we settled on cherry almond coffee cake. yum!

cooking with angie was great, because she does it a lot like me. for example, sometimes when a recipe calls for oil, she just pools a bunch of cooking spray into a measuring spoon. genius. she was also cool with doing a lot of work while i ate a bowl of pasta for dinner.



and, we agreed that cakes with sour cream as an ingredient are both fancy-seeming and delicious.



also fancy and delicious? cakes that involve fruit. and everything goes better if you laugh charmingly while doing it, as you can clearly see here.



one thing i have learned about frances cake is that cutting the recipe in half is always a good move, since there just aren't that many people around to eat the final product. it hasn't been a problem in the past but this time, the smaller pan i chose for the smaller recipe was much deeper than the pan the recipe called for, so we ended up having the bake the cake for almost an hour (or maybe a little more) to bake it all the way through.



the good news, though, was that was an hour of good times with angie. we talked about new york (where i had just been and where she was about to go), and things we want to accomplish before we turn 35 (fly a kite in central park and meet barack obama are two of hers; i want to visit all seven wonders of the world), and read a bunch of funny blogs.

and then, we ate delicious, delicious cake.







it survived pretty well for having been baked for so long. only the bottom was a little, um, burned. and even ck, who is allergic to wheat, sugar and pretty much everything else in the cake, could pick out the cherries and enjoy them. another frances cake success.