4-Ingredient Slow Cooker Coconut Cake
What are your favorite rituals? Life goes thick and thin in cycles, and at this point I’m old enough to recognize when it’s time to hunker down through a thin space. Busyness, fatigue, grief, stress, depression — so many things can pull at us until all we can focus on is putting one foot in front of the other. When things thin out for me, I brace for the exhaustion and stock my cupboards with moments of contentedness in preparation the leanness to come.
3-Ingredient Slow-Cooker Pumpkin Cake
Let’s talk about ugliness.
When my students study American history, they often begin by talking about the Native Americans and the beginning of colonization. In English, we use this time to read excerpts from Christopher Columbus’s diaries. Let me tell you, in those diaries . . . there is ugliness.
Pumpkin Skillet Cake with Caramel Crackle Icing
Maybe it’s you: maybe managing your mental illness makes you feel alone even when you’re surrounded by other people. Nobody’s experience is quite like yours. Maybe it’s your friend or family member: maybe from your point of view, they never seem to get it together.
According to the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 1 out of every 5 adults has a mental illness and 1 out of every 24 adults has a serious mental illness (i.e., one that significantly interferes with one or more major life activities). Personally, I deal with a fun confluence of several mental illnesses and I wish people understood that my daily life and experiences are different from theirs. People tend to evaluate things through their own personal lens without realizing they’re doing so, which is dangerous in all kinds of ways. Pondering this made me want to ask you all on Facebook what you wish people knew about mental illness, and here’s what was said:
Pumpkin Spice Latte Snack Cake
I wrote this post as part of the Plugrá Butter Brigade. Thanks, Plugrá, for sponsoring this post and for making my favorite butter!
So before we get into this post and I get angry emails, let me just note that this cake involves no latte. I called it a Pumpkin Spice Latte Snack Cake because (a) I want to steal Starbucks’ excellent SEO and (B) it reminds me of a Pumpkin Spice Latte: the pumpkin spice, the caramel drizzle, the full 12 months I waited to consume it again without being weird. But there’s no coffee in it. Sorry if that’s misleading. But obviously not that sorry, or I would’ve changed it.
ANYWAY IT’S FALL.
Check out Apps to Get Your Om On: The Best Loved Meditation Apps
by Julie Ruble at Mode
Thanks so much to Mode Media for sponsoring this post!
Roasted Peach Skillet Cake Recipe
In a few short hours I’m packing up and heading off to Maine for a trip with my tiny 9th grade class. We’ll paddle for hours to reach a remote island where we’ll set up camp. We’ll have transformative conversations (and roasted marshmallows) around a campfire. What we won’t have are computers.
