Hummingbird Cake - not as gruesome as it sounds.

This is the first Sunday I've stayed home from church since November when we started attending FUMC.  I have a good reasons, though:

1. I haven't had a very good night's sleep in about a week (loosely translated: I'm normally a narcoleptic as soon as I get in bed, and lately I've been more like a normal person), and I needed one morning to sleep as late as I wanted.  "As late as I want," evidently, means 8:20 am.

2. I'm filthy, and even if I wanted to sleep in and also go to church (thereby omitting the shower step), I couldn't because I'm in that awkward time where I took a shower on Friday night because I had to work on Saturday morning and didn't want to have to wake up too early to do that.  Saturday I was "clean" all day, but now it's Sunday and I'm back on track for my normal morning showers, but I technically haven't had a shower since Friday.  Anyway, omitting the shower for this morning would be totally unacceptable.

3. Today we are celebrating my wonderful Mama's birthday (which is actually on Tuesday), and I have the distinct honor of baking her cake for this party.  I want to do the best job I can, and also take my time and learn while doing.

This brings us to the purpose of today's blog entry.  Hummingbird Cake.  I'm not sure why it's called that, except maybe because it's so insanely sweet.  I've actually never been a huge fan of it, but that's why we don't eat it on my birthday.  It has crushed pineapple and bananas baked into the cake, and it's slathered with a serious overabundance of cream cheese icing.  I'm sure I'll eat it and scrutinize my skills (or lack thereof) when I normally would have passed on a serving.  However, until I get so confident in my cake-baking skills that I know without a shadow of a doubt that it's edible, I can't allow other people to be my blind guinea pigs.

I'm baking it in a stone 9x13 baking dish, which is a first for me, so we'll see how it turns out.

Here's the before picture:

There's a lot of Wal-Mart represented in this picture, as well as Pampered Chef.  Those lovely glass measuring cups in the background are actually Mom Diehl's, and don't have anything to do with the baking process of this particular cake.  I'll be giving those back today at the birthday party.  :-)

Anyway, I hope I can update this entry in a little while with successful during- and after-pictures.  In the mean time, have a lovely Sunday!

Shalom. :-)

P.S. Don't worry, I'm going to take a shower before I bake the cake!

Update: Sometime after Sunday's birthday party.

Here are pictures!  The cake was a total success.  It looked decent, and it tasted great!  Even I enjoyed it and had a second piece.  Here are the aforementioned during- and after-pictures: