Sunday

For my roommate's actual birthday we opted for the classic, Cake Love. Aptly named, it serves up trendy cupcakes, such as chocolate with peanut butter icing, and slices of the real deal, my roommate's choice, mud cream. Layers couldn’t look better on the fashion runway.

The new location in Shirlington, VA, seems to suffer the same malady of fame as Just Cakes: having to hand it over cold. Supply and demand can breech even the strictest code of baked-good ethics, which hang on the new establishment's walls: serve cake at 72 degrees. The remedy hangs on the adjoining wall: Let cake sit at room temperature for 15 minutes. It's well worth the wait.

Two hours of The Other Boleyn Girl didn't put enough of a dent in our stomachs to handle any more dining out, so we went home. Later that night, in our own kitchen, I did whip up some chocolate chip cookies and a pan of brownies as a nightcap, a feat I never could have pulled off in a hotel kitchenette.

My roommate seemed pleased with our in-town adventure, and I'm glad we didn't end up traveling. But I made a discovery nonetheless - a staycation and a vacation are equally exhausting. The weekend left me needing a nap and craving a pick-me-up, perhaps something sweet and chocolate.

Saturday

Recovering from our malt-shop hangover, although the stiffest drink we'd encountered was vanilla extract, we didn't leave home till the next afternoon. A breakfast of indulgent leftovers tided us over for a non-food venture, a visit to the Pope-Leighy House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Conveniently, the Usonian construction fit our weekend's theme of efficiency, compression and release. Frank had applied the principles to architecture, but they also held true for dessert consumption. Walking away under the sun-dappled branches leading to the 1,200-foot work of art, I thought of the wintry mix coating New York and smiled.

Deviating from a strict diet of cake and ice cream, we were on the road again in search of a decidedly different delicacy at the Dairy Godmother, in Alexandria. Containing more fat and less air than the formerly prized, ice cream, frozen custard won my vote for new favorite. Unfortunately, we picked the wrong time to institute our Split Rule. Even before we'd scraped the bowl for lingering traces of, yes, plain-old-chocolate custard, we knew we'd be back. My roommate assured a fellow patron of our guaranteed return just before we walked out the door in quest of real-food fortitude.

We found it at the Afghan Restaurant. Truth in advertising, we got just what we expected: kabobs, naan, yogurt sauce, and a side of cozy family feel. Leaving the table was like getting up from a holiday meal. We were stuffed but confident we could squeeze in another round of sundaes.

The Dairy Godmother's sour cherries are the redemption of fruit topping. Maraschino cherries must have at least started out as real fruit, before finding their destiny as the candied peak on whipped cream. A single cherry substitution spawned an additional trip to the counter and a side dish of the natural wonder, which I worked into my hot fudge topping and then pried back out when I realized I'd have to abandon the final stages of dessert bliss. I simply didn't have it in me, or rather, I already had far too much in me.