The holidays were a lot of fun but as always, you never get to do everything you might have planned or purposed to do. Sure, we did some fun Christmas baking with the kids, but the thing we really wanted to do was an Italian cheesecake with ricotta and mascarpone cheese and a biscotti crust. 
I was on a work trip right before the holidays and met with one of my clients who is a first generation Italian-New Yorker. We got chatting about food and he ended up sharing his most valued recipe… one, in fact, that he’s been perfecting for over 30 years. The story was there is a famous bakery in Brooklyn that is known for having some of the best cheesecakes around. The founder passed in the late 80’s and his famous cheesecake recipe was posted with his obituary. My client cut it out of the paper and started a tradition of baking it every year over the holidays… but tweaking it slightly each year as he perfected the recipe.  Fortunately, he offered to give it to me.
Needless to say, we have been wanting to try this recipe out for a couple weeks now but with holiday busyness, work, and sports routines, we’ve found ourselves either too tired or without the time to do it. We made a point to do a home date night and blocked out the time to do it as a team. We turned on some music, pulled out the ingredients, and rolled up our sleeves.
Ok, so I’ll be honest… the title picture is a professional one… ours (below) are a little different! 
First of all, we are not big bakers – we are cooks! So, it was really fun to explore something new and do something that we’ve never done before. We write a lot about the value of dating and pursuing each other in your relationship (before, with, and after kids!). The great thing is this whole date cost us less than $50 and we had a lot of fun. Actually, the real fun was waking up the next morning and having fresh cheesecake with our coffee!
In this new year, we want to encourage you to maybe pick 1 new thing a quarter that you and your spouse can do together to spice things up and mix up the routine. It can be something that one or neither of you have done, or maybe something you haven’t done together in a very long time. What’s fun, is that when you do something new, it requires you to lean on that other person in a way that you normally don’t have to do… and that’s what fuels relational growth.
Wishing you and yours the best start to 2024!
SD
Creating Exceptional 