I broke in my new cookbook, Snacking Cakes by Yossy Arefi, by baking an oatmeal chocolate chip cake tonight.

The cake is tasty, although all the chocolate chips sank to the bottom of the pan. I know how to resolve that with fruit (dredge it in flour), but I don’t know if there’s a similar fix for chocolate. Rudi and I ate nearly half the pan tonight, which the author does warn is a distinct possibility for all the cakes she includes.

While the concept caught my eye, it is the unfussiness of the recipes that made me buy the cookbook on impulse. Each recipe includes what you need to do if you’re using a different type of pan (loaf or sheet), an alternate flavor, and a way to gussy it up (flavored whipped creams, mostly), and most of the recipes are prepped in a single bowl.

I had Rudi pick the inaugural recipe, but since my birthday is coming up this weekend, I think I’ll reserve the next pick. There’s one with pink frosting that’s calling out my name.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to come up with our own topic about Valentine’s Day or love. I’ve opted to go with the top ten books I’ve read with “Love” in the title:

1. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: A teenager and a senior citizen bond over a book the girl’s mother is translating.
2. Love Is a Mix-Tape by Rob Sheffield: A memoir of Sheffield’s late wife and his grief in losing her, as told through music. Heartbreaking, but even more so because it’s so relatable.
3. Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern: A boy and a girl grow up and grow apart and grow back together again, always brought back together by the power of the letters they send each other.
4. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech: A boy begrudgingly writes a series of poems for a class assignment — and turns it into both a conversation with his teacher and an ode to a beloved pet.
5. My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories, edited by Stephanie Perkins: This collection of romantic holiday-themed short stories written by the hottest YA authors of the time is varied and charming.
6. Book Love by Debbie Tung: A highly relatable collection of comics about being a bibliophile.
7. The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough: Historical fiction about a young woman who wants to fly planes, a wealthy young man with a bright future, and the supernatural characters of Love and Death, whose games have caused all the star-crossed lovers throughout time. The final chapter of this book has been my mind a lot recently.
8. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone: A biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband, William, and the role they played in the advent of cryptology and modern spycraft in the first half of the 20th century.
9. P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han: Really, the whole series of Lara Jean Covey Song novels, about what happens when diaristic love letters you meant to remain private end up in the hands of your crushes.
10. Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch: After her mother dies, a teen learns her mother has asked a strange man who lives in Italy (in a cemetery) to be her guardian. She comes to understand that choice by reading the journal her mother kept during her own teen odyssey to Italy decades earlier.

How about you? Are there Love books you’ve loved?

With apologies to my northern readers, I thought I’d share some of my photos from walking around this weekend, since our snowstorm gave us no accumulation today.

I first saw snowdrops in the week after Christmas. They’re growing in huge clumps around the grounds of the Quaker meetinghouse.

Georgetown continues to be full of winter jasmine.

It was a lovely sunset this evening over the Potomac River. The Georgetown Waterfront Park is one of my favorite urban reclamation projects in D.C. For decades, it was an inaccessible parking lot, used more by tourists than by locals. But for nearly ten years now, it’s routinely been filled with people enjoying the outdoors, including the river stairs where I took these shots.

In a few years (and a week), I hit the half century mark. It’s a time for reflection, for figuring out what I want to do with the second half of my life, with the last couple decades of my career, and generally build upon the foundation I’ve built during my first five decades.

In the six months before I turned 30, I started a list of things I wanted to accomplish before I left my twenties. I have absolutely no idea what was on that list, but I’m confident it exists in a notebook somewhere, either here or in boxes at my parents’. I’m also positive that I didn’t accomplish half of it, in part because I left it too late to do the things that were harder and required either planning or real change.

So, I’m going to make a list for my birthday next week — a list of 50 things I want to do before I turn 50. I’m going to leave some of them blank, so that the list can grow with me, but I feel confident that if I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard I can come up with a list that gives me a path forward. I’m not a huge list follower (my weekend plans lists are more things for me to consider doing, but not expect to complete), but I think writing things down can be a healthy exercise. If nothing else, doing it will allow me to give voice to some of the things that I would like to do with my life, but haven’t given corporeal form to — and the time to actually accomplish them. (For instance, I’m clearly not traveling internationally in the next six months, but I do think my passport might be expiring this year and now would be a smart time to get it renewed.)

Do you have a list of things you’d like to accomplish by your next birthday (or the next decade change)? If so, do you have them written down somewhere, or are they just inscribed in your mind? Or do you tend toward just going with the flow?

An old friend and I took a long walk last night and by the time I came home, I was so chilly and tired that my cocoa, the last chapter of my book, and the comfort of the couch did me in.

But in the interest of sharing something, here’s some of the rabbit hole I fell down today — covers of Beatles songs by artists I like:

Pomplamoose: “Something”

Brandi Carlisle: “All You Need Is Love”

Lake Street Dive: “Don’t Let Me Down”

Do you have a favorite Beatles’ cover?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi arrived home just after I returned from my snowy walk, so I didn’t have to do any of the shoveling.

2. Because the Capitol grounds are now behind razor wire and because it’s been two years since our last snowstorm, the P Street “Beach” was packed with sledders.

3. My warm weather walk on Saturday included stops at two bookstores — the new cookbook shop, where I picked up Snacking Cakes, and the used Adams Morgan shop that changed hands last year, and which has added new titles to its stock. I came away with a middle-grade fantasy novel blurbed by Madeleine L’Engle, a pamphlet on identifying trees in the wintertime, and the aforementioned poetry collection.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?