dinner at eight :: breakfast for dinner

{Dinner at Eight is a special project I am doing with my friend Rebekah this year - planning date nights at home for our husbands every other week, putting the kids to bed early and being intentional about our marriages! Read more Dinner at Eight posts HERE!}

{P.S. I am so sorry this week's post is a few days late! We were out of town last Wednesday to late Sunday night and I just was not able to get it up before I left!}

 Breakfast food. One of Erik and my favorites! I have so many fond memories of past dates at our favorite breakfast restaurants. Long Shoreman's Daughter (now closed) in Fremont Seattle when we were very first married, and  Little Cheerful + The Old Town Cafe when we lived in Bellingham. We have yet to find a favorite breakfast haunt in our current hometown, so for this date I set about recreating some favorites from the past.

First, I chose a name for our little at-home restaurant that combined two of our old favorites: The Old Cheerful Cafe. I searched and searched online for some kind of fun art to add to the menu cover and was so excited when I found this sweet teacup design as a free printable over at Creature Comforts.

I set our table using one of my favorite vintage tablecloths that was given to me by a dear friend, some colorful Fiestaware dishes, and canning jars for glasses. I love that Fiestaware can easily be dressed up or down and the colors just make me so happy. Little Cheerful is also one of the very first places that I really fell in love with Fiestaware. Our napkins were placed in an old galvanized bucket.

Creating our date night menu ended up being a bit harder than I had originally anticipated. With Easter Sunday falling just a couple days before our date, I realized a little too late that I had used some of our favorite breakfast foods for our family's after church Easter Brunch- quiche, banana muffins, + cinnamon petal biscuits.

So I asked Erik what his number one favorite breakfast food was and he said roasted red potatoes. Thankfully I hadn't made potatoes for Easter, so we had those. Audrey had been asking all week for me to make her favorite zucchini muffins, so I added those to the list. Then I just added a few more things that I knew were always hits- orange juice, glazed chocolate donuts from our favorite grocery store, a strawberry citrus salad, and well-done bacon (Erik insists on all of his meat being well-done!). I planned on also serving Irish Cream hot chocolate, but honestly once we had eaten everything else, we were completely full and not really in the mood for anything else sweet.

Another thing that was kind of a challenge with this date is the fact that Erik was home while I was trying to set it up. He just started a brand new job today (a huge huge answer to prayer!), and last week he ended up having a few days off in between jobs. So while I was trying to prepare all the food and set up the table, I was also trying to keep as much of it under wraps as I could!

When it was all said and done, Erik and I both agreed that this date was our very favorite one yet! So many of our favorite foods, combined with so many happy memories from our past. Erik also mentioned that he really loved the time I took to create a meaningful menu and a cozy table. Just like Rebekah, I had planned on us watching Breakfast at Tiffany's when we were done eating, but our stomachs were really full and we still had quite a bit of packing to do for our out of town trip the next day, so we ended up skipping it.

I am already really looking forward to our next Dinner at Eight!

{Don't forget to check out Rebekah's sweet Breakfast for Dinner date. That girl is seriously amazing when it comes to setting the atmosphere + decorating!}