Wednesday, January 13, 2010

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.

3 comments:

  1. wait a minute there... so you waited till we left and then made this beautiful cake???? what's up with that????????
    Just kidding, dinner was awesome and freeloaders like me cannot really complain.

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  2. Ihab, you're not a freeloader...you brought cheesy puffs! :)

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  3. This looks like a great time - I love game nights! We just started doing a monthly Couples Game Night where we get together the first week of each month (we rotate houses to mix it up a bit, and the host house provides dinner, so we always get interesting cuisine...but Chinese food and Brown Sugar Pecan Cake sounds equally as enjoyable!), we have game wheels for small prizes like a bottle of wine, we set a movie up on the projector, and just play games and hang out...it's so much fun, and inexpensive! :)

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