Today my parents celebrated 40 years of wedded bliss! They were high school sweethearts in Jefferson, IA.

In 1972, they tied the knot and moved into a tin house that rented for $40 a month.

They raised three charming children….

….and they’re still going strong! I will tell you the secret to TomKat’s lasting union: they go on two romantic dates every weekend. The first is on Saturday morning, to HyVee for grocery shopping. The second is on Sunday morning, to Panera for breakfast and a very thorough reading of the newspaper. Today, in honor of the occasion, I made them skip their Panera date and come to my apartment for breakfast.

The first item on the menu was a cinnamon roll coffee cake, using this recipe with the following changes:

• I cut all of the measurements for the cake in half, and baked in an 8×8 pan instead of a 9×13, cutting about 5 minutes off the baking time.
• I did not make the glaze. (I try to avoid confectioner’s sugar at least until noon.)

Second, I made mini quiches that were meant to be knock-offs of the little spinach-artichoke quiches they sell at Panera. These were a lot of fun to make, and there are all kinds of possibilities for variation.

Once again, here’s the link to the recipe I used, and here are my changes (notice how I’m being lazy today–I love it when I don’t actually have to type out an entire recipe):

• I used puff pastry instead of crescent roll dough. If you do the same, you’ll need one of the sheets from a 17-oz. box. I defrosted it in the fridge overnight.
• I used all monterey jack cheese, instead of the three different kinds used in the recipe.
• I added a few dashes of hot sauce.
• As you can see above, I used tartlet pans instead of ramekins. This was for purely aesthetic reasons. (Tartlet pans are just so charming.)

These were very well-received, and I was mostly happy with the final product, but next time I may make some more adjustments because I thought there was a little too much pastry and not enough filling.

This is unrelated to breakfast, but I also made a champagne cake today and it was so pretty that I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t include a couple of glamour shots:

That recipe was courtesy of this cookbook.

Wishing you all a wonderful week ahead! I have to go wash dishes.