Cake #9: New Year's Eve Cake

It's been awhile since I've made a cake (like 8 months!) and the next cake in the book was described as "if you were one of those kids who couldn't wait to chaw on a hot fireball candy, then this coffee cake is for you". I am going to bake this cake soon, but since we were having people over for New Year's Eve, I decided to skip it and go to the next cake, Dorie Greenspan's Swedish Visiting Cake. It was pretty easy to make, pretty fattening and sweet, and the only problem I had was trying to dec it out for new year's:
Once I poured the batter into the pan, instead of putting almonds all over the top, I tried to leave them off the section in the middle that says "2011"- see it? Look closely. You could still see it after it was baked, if I told you about it and traced my finger around where the numbers are:

The numbers even turned out browner than the almonds around them, so it should have worked! But almonds might be too large for this sort of thing, and damn it was time-consuming.
This cake has a zest of one entire lemon, so it's quite lemony. It also calls for almond extract, which can be overpowering, so next time I think I'll cut the almond in half. I would also like to try to make it with 1/2 the butter. It calls for 1 stick melted, and it just seemed like a lot. I wonder if you could add 1/4 c applesauce to the sugar at the begging, and then 1/2 stick of melted butter to the batter at the end.

The cake didn't rise very much, but it was easy to cut into small slices and serve to a lot of people. It would make a good sweet coffee cake.