A Chocolatey Peanut Butter Valentine

February 14--that wonderful day overly commercialized, over hyped and dreaded by men everywhere. One of my favorite parts of Valentine's Day is seeing all those guys in the grocery store, Target, etc, etc buying flowers, chocolates, searching for the card expressing an appropriate level of affection. They all just look so out of their element. It's great. I also love watching and listening to the elementary school kids picking out the box of Valentine's cards to give to their classmates. Those were the days, weren't they? Finding a box that had a really great card for the guy/gal you had a crush on but with appropriately banal comments for everyone else, making your little "mail box", having the class party where everyone delivers their cards to everyone else. I don't think I understood how great it was as a kid.

Cinnamon Sugar Cake

February is a wonderful month, full of wonderful things like purple, amethysts, winter, overly commercialized holidays....and my birthday! Impending doom (i.e. boards) or no, I had to make a cake for my birthday earlier this week. What's a birthday without cake? I am on an upswing in terms of my love of my birthday. I liked it when I was quite young, then my birthday spirit took a nose dive throughout jr. high & high school. During college, birthdays started to make a very slow comeback....coincident with my renewed interest in baking. I made a cinnamon sugar cake with brown sugar cinnamon buttercream frosting from a recipe on The Pastry Affair, with a few substitutions.

No, one is never too old for birthday candles. 

Magic Microwave Nutella Cake

     This February marks an interesting time in my educational career. In two weeks, I will be done with classroom-based learning for the foreseeable future. While I am excited to begin third year in a few months, this will be the end of an era of my life. It will be the end of my comfort zone entirely as I have been in a classroom since I was 3 or 4 years old; indeed, I have done very little else. We got our third year schedules this past week. The student lounge when this occurred was a scene straight from the past. Everyone was eager to see what they got and compare with others, just like getting schedules in jr. high & high school. For the most part, I am pleased with my schedule. Happily I have the rotation I am least excited about and causes me the greatest anxiety first; I will be glad to get it out of the way. This is a difficult time in the course of medical education, mostly because it requires a great deal of self-discipline in the face of anxiety and undue stress given the increasing emphasis of board scores on residency applications. While I can feel the anxiety about the boards and beginning third year mounting with each passing day, I am determined to focus on one day at a time and try not to let the pressure to study all the time eat away at other areas of my life like eating real food and getting off my butt for a little while each day. On the whole, though, I am eager to get through these last hoops of classroom education and get into the wards. I am approaching third year with a somewhat open mind about what I ultimately want to go into, but it will be interesting to see how my specialty preference changes throughout the year.