The sweetest cake

There's something absolutely fantastic, if a little surreal, about Facebook. I got a notification that a friend had mentioned me in a comment. This is a friend I haven't seen in person in, I don't know, maybe fifteen years, but Facebook keeps us connected. And the post he was commenting on was a post from his ex-girlfriend, who I've seen even less recently and have not kept in touch with. Here was the post:

And really, I was just kind of blown away. I mean, first, this was taken from a cookbook that my best friend and I put together for a bunch of our college friends 20 years ago when we were just barely out of college. We solicited recipes from the other dudes and compiled it, though quite a lot of the recipes came from the two of us. This was--more or less--a recipe that I got from my mom (the final admonition there was my own, from hard-earned experience). But first, it's weird to see this familiar recipe in a digital form on Facebook, because I'm used to seeing it printed out. 

And then, of course, it's touching to realize that someone I haven't seen in a long, long time thinks of me every so often, still making this recipe (which I still sometimes make, too, by the way). 

And I was struck by the mention of making cupcakes out of this recipe, because I had been contemplating how I could make cupcakes work from this recipe, so I asked about it, which revealed that she and my friend had been reading the recipe in a fundamentally different way from the way that I had. 

Now, it's entirely possible that I've been interpreting the recipe wrong all these years. I mean, it's not like it doesn't make sense to mix everything together. You know, as one does when baking a cake. But it is so good when you have this pumpkin layer and then a cake layer and then--the real star of any cake it's on--the cream cheese frosting. 

But anyway, the point is that everything about this just made my day. Also, this recipe is fantastic. If you like pumpkin and cream cheese, make this sooner rather than later. 

And remember: never every use low-fat--never mind fat free--cream cheese. It is seriously assy.