No long, drawn out descriptions from me today. All you need to know is that you need to make this gingerbread cake with coffee icing. Why? Because it’s easy and delicious and I loved it even though I don’t particularly like gingerbread. With loads of spices, dark beer, coffee, cocoa powder and molasses, how could I not love it?

The recipe is from The Craft of Baking by Karen Demasco and Mindy Fox (which is a pretty cool cookbook that I’ll purchase someday soon). The actual recipe is for 18 cupcakes. I made a bundt cake instead because I currently don’t own any muffin tins for making cupcakes (that’s a long story for some other day). I didn’t alter the size of the recipe at all. Batter for 18 cupcakes is apparently exactly the right amount of batter for a bundt cake.

Other than making cake instead of cupcakes, the only change I really made was the use of porter instead of stout. Yes, I live on the edge when it comes to recipe alterations. I also skipped the candied ginger on top as I truly believe that would have been weird on a cake.

Since this is a lazy post and since NPR was kind enough to post the recipe on their website, I’m not posting it here.

P.S. If you’ve read this far and care, I have no wedding plans to blab about at the moment. We’re still figuring out the when and where.

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Rather than writing about food as I should be, I’m going to talk about getting engaged!

Before I bore you to death with the details, know that I’m mostly writing this entry for posterity. I don’t actually think everyone reading my blog really  cares about me getting married. You’re all here for the food!

On Good Friday, I got out of work early and we headed across the state to spend Easter weekend with the boyfriend’s fiance’s family. We’d looked at the weather days earlier and since it was going to be warm and beautiful, Joel suggested that we take a little afternoon detour into Shenandoah National Park/Skyline Drive. Nothing about this suggestion was at all suspicious as it was something we might have done anyway. Little did I know what was up his sleeve…

We approached several scenic overlooks but didn’t actually stop at any of them for whatever reason. This seemed a little odd to me but I figured we were looking for a good spot to take a few pictures of the view. Again, nothing suspicious. We finally pulled over at the Sawmill Ridge Overlook. We got the camera bag out of the trunk and I pulled out the camera to take a few pictures. Joel wandered off and took the camera bag with him despite my offer to hold onto it or put it back in the trunk.

He wandered back, we took a few pictures and sat down on the stone ledge to admire the view. After talking for a few minutes, Joel all of a sudden said, “I’ve got something to ask you.” He reached into the camera bag and pulled out a little black box. I, being the weepy wuss that I am, immediately started tearing up and then he pulled a note out of his pocket. Written by his grandmother many years ago (just before Joel’s mother passed away), the note read that Joel’s mom wanted her engagement ring saved for him to use if he chose to do so. My ring has 3 diamonds, one of the smaller ones is from his mother’s engagement ring. At this point, I said, “Yes!” and then realized that he hadn’t actually said, “Will you marry me?” yet. At which point he asked and I said, “Yes!” for real.

This is where I admit that I’ve never really cared about weddings or engagements very much. When other people got engaged and eventually married, I was happy for them but never super, hyper excited about it. I was kind of apathetic about having an actual wedding myself and always kind of thought I’d just run off somewhere and get hitched. The ring and the actual proposal changed my mind. I want a real wedding and I’m ecstatic about being engaged. We’re also both really amazed at how excited other people seem to be about our engagement. The outpouring of happiness from everyone we know makes the whole thing a little more awesome. Being told that the news of our engagement made someone else’s day is pretty cool. So, after all these years of not quite understanding why weddings are such a big deal, I finally get it.

There aren’t many details to share about the actual wedding yet. We haven’t finalized a date, a venue or even the wedding party. About all we do know is that I won’t be making my own wedding cake!

P.S. I promise to try my best not to turn this into a wedding blog.

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