frances cake, take four

miaken is the very definition of a friend crush. i had seen her around on facebook, linked to a lot of my friends and in a lot of pictures of things that looked totally awesome and i wanted to meet her so bad. and then i invited myself to rob's art night a little while back, and there she was! i may or may not have totally accosted her and forced her to sit next to me. or it may have just happened that way on its own. i can't quite remember. but, we traced our hands and turned the shapes into pictures, and she gave me a really great lead on a story for the paper and i invited her over for cake. friend dreams do come true!

miaken and i were meant to be friends because we were both craving some kind of lemon cake, but i didn't know she wanted lemon, too, until after i had already picked a lemon cream cake recipe. so it was like fate, you know? and we decided to make cupcakes, because lemon always tastes better in a cupcake form, i feel.

there were no major glitches in the preparation or baking. in fact, the cupcakes were practically perfect, as you will see for yourselves in a moment. the only minor snag was the frosting. we decided to eschew measuring and put in as much lemon juice as we wanted (the more the better, right?) but that made for some consistency problems that proved slightly difficult to remedy. the final product was more of a glaze than a frosting, but it was still completely delicious.

and, in the meantime, i learned that miaken is from kansas and she had her first stitches that very day (non-traumatic for her, in case you were wondering. she sort of liked it). we also talked about how she wanted to go back to school to study film, and she just found out this week that she was accepted! hurrah! it's a frances cake miracle!

susan just bought a new camera and was testing it out this particular day, so she documented the proceedings. i think she captured the divinity of these particular cupcakes very skillfully.