Baking with Friends - Cinnamon Swirl Cake

This weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out with my friend Honor. We had an awesome Pho dinner (if you have yet to try it, you need to. Best. Thing. Ever.) and then we spent the rest of the evening baking. I was really excited because I wanted to try a new recipe and plus it is always fun to bake with a friend. This is another recipe I found on allrecipes.com. It is a cinnamon swirl cake. Honor helped by chopping the pecans. The recipe called for walnuts but I already had some pecans in the pantry.

I love this girl because she is as picky about how to chop nuts as I am. We both like to get the pecans finely chopped. Neither of us like chunks in our desserts (we're two peas, Honor and I) plus I feel like the finer chopped nuts bring out more flavor. It really makes a difference!

The batter is a really simple cake batter. I was excited to try the swirl part. The trick is to layer half the batter in the form, add the cinnamon layer, and then add the rest of the batter. Well, Honor and I figured we added about half of the batter only to find that towards the end we probably added three quarters of the batter. So we thought we would just see how it turned out. After baking, the cake smelled amazing. The cinnamon and pecans added such a comforting smell to the kitchen that it felt like Christmas. We sliced the cake to see how it turned out and it looked beautiful!

I was so happy with the final product except for one thing: since we added too much batter before the cinnamon layer I would be cutting off most the cinnamon if I leveled the bottom of the bundt! Oh well, it still tasted great.

I was glad to share the fruit of our labors with Honor's family. I did end up taking a little bit home. I knew my husband would love this and I just had to share with him, too!

Thank you, Honor, for a fun night of baking!