It feels good to have my own space again. My belongings are finally unpacked (well, most of them, anyway) and put away in closets, cabinets and atop shelves—a sure sign of permanence in a housing situation.

There’s a supreme comfort in having your possessions accessible to you, isn’t there? As soon as I unpacked my cookbooks, which had remained sealed in storage since Virginia, I couldn’t stop tearing them from the bookshelves and rifling through their photos and recipes. I was ravenous not for the food, but for the return of a sense of ownership. Even if I wasn’t planning on making anything—and for awhile, the fridge and pantry were too barren to raid—it was still nice to know that Ina Garten’s Tuscan Lemon Chicken was there, just in case my eyes (or my soul) got hungry.

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I’m not usually one to miss important milestones. But it seems that I graduated from college one year ago last May, and the entire month swept by without my recognizing the anniversary.

In the grand scheme of things, how meaningful is this milestone, really? It’s not a day that we’re socially conditioned to remember, like we recognize a close friend’s birthday with a restaurant dinner, or our wedding anniversaries with gifts that riff on paper, silver, or lace. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since my college graduation ceremony, it’s that life no longer hands you obvious deadlines, and the rest of your life’s “universal” rites of passage can be counted on two measly fingers (marriage, and babies—if you even choose to dabble in either). For twenty-two years, my classmates and I were shuttled in lockstep through various life stages with astounding predictability, mostly thanks to our highly-structured educational system. And then? We reached the last page of our guidebook the day we donned one-size-fits-all gowns and threw our tasseled caps in the air. In the wide-open plains of post-graduate life, we’ve had to find our own meaning and order. You know, construct our own roads and fences, if you’ll beat that metaphor to death with me.

So I chose to celebrate this belated anniversary, arbitrary though it may be, and I celebrated with cake. That’s how all milestones should be marked, right? It was banana chocolate walnut cake, extraordinarily light but equally flavorful, and yet simple enough for the made-up occasion. There was ice cream too, of course.

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As a hopeless perfectionist, I find delight in telling you that the below-described cake has absolutely no flaws. Having said that, it’s probably healthier if I also admit that it took me two attempts to attain said perfection. (And, okay, that it took me about ten minutes to write those two sentences.)

I first read about this cake on Molly Wizenberg’s blog, and then later in her wonderful book. In between, I saw countless reproductions of her Winning Hearts and Minds cake in the blogosphere, convinced finally by Shannalee’s post to try the damn thing already. It seemed that everyone who had ever eaten a slice was star-struck, and every baker assured readers of its absurd simplicity: butter, sugar, chocolate, eggs, and a tablespoon of flour. Heaven emerging from a cake pan in twenty-five minutes, essentially. For someone used to chasing perfection, it seemed that this one had been dropped in my lap, and it actually sounded easy. My sanity might remain intact to see another day!

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As I had hoped, three city-dwelling friends visited my suburban apartment this Saturday, plied by promises of (what else?) food, and lots of it. Formally, this gathering would be called a dinner party—but that sounds so staid, doesn’t it? I think of dinner parties as those events of my youth when children were banished by means of early bedtimes. As a child then, my biased opinion was that dinner parties must be no-fun zones washed of spontaneity and liveliness.

Of course, as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned better. Now that college is over, dinner parties are a great way for groups of far-flung friends to get together at once. They’re cheap, with only the cost of an extra bag of groceries to fuel an evening. And they don’t require screaming over music and strangers, as with nights spent at restaurants or bars. Really, I’m glad that I’ve gotten over that childhood bias, just as I’m relieved to have recovered from another one: vegetable phobia. Because when dressed up with cake batter, golden raisins, and white chocolate, carrots ain’t half bad.

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