"...we hope this doesn't ruin your life..."

Last week, we caused our downstairs neighbors some inconvenience (I won't go into it, but let's just say there was some water coming through their ceiling), and I baked them a bundt cake to make amends. They weren't home when I went to drop it off, so I left the covered plate outside their door.

The next evening we went up to visit our upstairs neighbors. This makes our building sound absurdly cozy. The truth is, that while there are only five apartments, and we're friendly all around, we don't socialize all that much. Still, we have a lot in common with the folks upstairs, and when we do see them, even for a short stairway conversation, I always think that we should spend more time hanging out.

Back to the story at hand--we went up to see the upstairs neighbors. The conversation turned to the water incident, and Clarence, who also has a food blog and loves to cook, said, "Oh, is that why there was a cake in the hallway?" I admitted my complicity, and he mentioned that any cakes that came their way would also be welcomed.

Now, it doesn't take a special occasion to get a cake out of me, but I knew they'd be getting a cake immediately when he followed up his cake observations by saying they had something to tell us...

"Now," he said, "we hope this doesn't ruin your life...but we're going to have a baby."

We assured him that we couldn't imagine it ruining our lives (we like little people, and are already up at all hours). In fact, if they let me put a funny hat on their kid, it may well enhance my life immensely. They laughed, and said they had heard that it might ruin their lives, but they would take advantage of Matt's 3AM ukulele solos as lullaby fodder.

With all this good news and running up and down the stairs, it was clearly time to make them a cake. I chose one of the last contenders in the Rose's Heavenly Cake countdown, an Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake.  It's a simple but appealing sweet, two layers of sour cream coffeecake, sandwiched around a thin apple cinnamon filling, and covered with buttery walnut streusel.

Two unrelated notes: my spellcheck doesn't recognise coffeecake or streusel. Or spellcheck. It has a lot to learn. Also, I am really over people using 'buttery' to describe rich tuna belly or other sashimi. Maybe I just don't like sashimi. At any rate, Clarence assures us that the cake was excellent.