Five Friday Favorites 03/11/16

Thanks for all your well wishes on my essay yesterday! After about six hours of typing and erasing and rereading and expanding, I knocked out a rough draft. I’ll spend today doing some editing and polishing, but the worst part of this final is over. Aaaand then I get to spend the next few days studying for the other two. 😛 Anyway, Happy Friday! I hope you had a good week. I think I did. I mean, it was the last week of the quarter and I don’t think anything bad happened…? Honestly, I’m a little bit exhausted and I can’t quite remember. But I do remember that there were some pretty great things from the week, so let’s end it on a high note and look back at those, shall we?

• Formal hall

You might have gathered this already, but I’m not a huge fan of our dining hall. And since I have a kitchen, I don’t go all that often. However, our house has a tradition where we dress up and take a group picture and go eat a totally normal, un-fancy dinner at the dining hall while looking fancy. I don’t dress up all that often and it’s nice to do occasionally, so Sunday was a good chance to do that.

• Dinner with Susie 

 

A photo posted by Ellen (@ellen_slater) on Mar 8, 2016 at 6:34pm PST

We’ve been talking about getting on each other’s (busy) schedules for a while, but on Tuesday we finally made it happen. She was kind enough to drive to Hyde Park and pick me up after work, and we grabbed dinner at The Sit Down Cafe nearby. We shared an order of salted edamame to start and I ordered a 12-inch prosciutto and mushroom pizza for my meal, and I made it through 5 of the 8 pieces before cutting myself off. Leftovers are a good thing. ?Anyway, aside from the delicious food, it was just fun meeting Susie and chatting about blogging and life.

• Open windows

I don’t have a good explanation for this, but the way the dorms here work is that they turn the air conditioning on once a year and leave it on until they turn on the heat. Simply, means that sometime in October or November, the heat is turned on and it doesn’t go off until sometime in late April or May. Practically, it means that the building is often not the right temperature. For example, on a random 65° day in early March, it’s freaking hot and sticky inside because the heat is still on. However, it gave us the perfect excuse to open the windows in the apartment on Wednesday night and it was glorious. My favorite time of the year is open-window time.

• Simultaneous procrastination

Two of my roommates and I spent much of Wednesday putting off writing our respective essays in every way we could think of and not realizing that we were all essentially doing the same thing. We all scrolled through way too much social media. One of my roommates sewed new buttons onto her shirt, the other washed and put away all of the dishes, and I tried to organize the spreadsheet with the house’s finances (I’m treasurer). Yesterday morning as we were getting ready and eating breakfast, we all committed to actually writing. We also all complained about it throughout the day, but we made a lot of progress.

• A deep dark chocolate fudgy mug cake 

 

A photo posted by Ellen (@ellen_slater) on Mar 10, 2016 at 4:37pm PST

I’ve been playing with mug cakes a lot this week, and this is such a winner. It’s much denser than your average cake, full of dark chocolate flavor, and just a little gooey. It’s perfect for satisfying a sweet tooth and feels much more substantial than a piece of chocolate. I made two to take pictures of for the recipe post (check back tomorrow!) and they might’ve become most of my dinner last night. 

Have a fabulous Friday!

Is there open-window weather where you are?

What’s your go-to sweet snack?

What are you loving this week?

Linking up with Heather and Katie