Chinese food and game night and a late night cake

The inspiration for tonight's meal came from the vegetable dumplings Mike's dad made for me. We have a special deal where he trades me dumplings for cookies. There were 40-50 dumplings taking up too much space in my freezer so I decided to make them for game night. But since those won't really home cooked, we also made some vegetable fried rice and fried tofu. I say we because Mike helped with the cooking...ok, he did most of the cooking, but I helped. Mike made great sauces for the tofu and dumplings. We had a pretty full table once Ihab, Megan, and Ben arrived.

After dinner, we played a rousing game of True Colors and had a great time laughing and finding out what everyone else thought of us. For dessert, Megan brought a yummy cake.

Once everyone left and I got done cleaning up it was pretty late and I was planning to go to bed, but I just couldn't get comfortable. So, I got up and decided to make a cake to bring into work in the morning for lab meeting. Late night baking has long been a habit of mine, though these days I sleep much more than I used to. I made a simple and delicious cake from the Magnolia Bakery cookbook - everyone at work seemed to enjoy it.

Brown Sugar Pecan Cake
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups chopped toasted pecans

Combine the dry ingredients. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time. Add dry ingredients in three parts, alternating with milk and vanilla, beating until smooth. Stir in 1 1/4 cups pecans. Pour batter into greased bundt or tube pan and sprinkle remaining pecans over the top. Bake at 325F for ~1 hour until a knife inserted comes out clean.