Final(s) Week in Boston

This past week has really been a crazy, occasionally stressful, but all around awesome final week in Boston, at least final week for my freshman year! It's been so fun taking breaks from final exams to spend time with lots of friends and eat out at some delicious places!

It will be so strange for me not seeing the new friends I have met here over the summer, as they all live all across the US! Summer will be a fun experience back at home with friends and family I have missed while at school, but I will really really miss my new friends and am already so excited for school to start again in the fall!

I thought I'd share some pictures of my friends and I while sharing about some of the delicious restaurants we have visited that are now some of my favorites!

1. Ribelle- 
Mary and I had to get brunch with with our amazing Intervarsity Christian Fellowship leader Olivia and had the best time eating at Ribelle in Washington Square! It was all of our first times, and I have been raving about the place since!  Ribelle has a small, inventive menu that changes weekly. The space has a minimalist feel but the flavors are bold and involve many unique and unconventional combinations! Really a cool place. 

We split three things, including my favorite, sourdough pancakes with lime curd, butterscotch, and freeze dried raspberries! (as seen in the beautiful picture below) Everything was beyond delicious and great for sharing!

Hard to believe, but tastes even better than it looks!

Egg Bolognese (left) and the tastiest kale ever (right)

Olivia and I!

2. Root-

My great roomie Hyewon and I decided to try out Root, a quaint, casual cafe with a rustic feel. Root has a small menu filled with creative vegan combinations, from your not-so-traditional black bean quinoa burger with a side of delicious herbed fries (which were irresistibly good), to a Crispy Cauliflower PoBoy and Eggplant Caprese Sandwich. The prices were great for the large portion sizes! 

Tostadas with chili spiced sweet potatoes and corn/black bean salsa! 

 3. FoMu Ice Cream-
After Root, we had to check out FoMu, a unique ice cream shop right next door! FoMu makes vegan ice cream (I know, sounds weird, but actually SO good!) with most flavors made from a coconut milk base. They have so many unique flavors from roasted cinnamon banana to avocado to sweet lavender! I got a combo of Purple Mu (raspberry, blueberry with dark and white chocolate chips and Magic Bar (vanilla ice cream with coconut flakes, chocolate, graham cracker, and vegan caramel) and Hyewon got half Magic Bar and half Sweet Lavender! Hyewon had never had vegan ice cream before, and actually said it tasted better than the original! Who knew!

4. Sweetgreen-

I have written about Sweetgreen a few times before and I can't emphasize how much I love their amazing, fresh salads. Sweetgreen has a menu of great, made-to-order salads, or you can make a custom salad from their endless choices of greens, toppings, and dressings! I love how they list the local farms where they get their ingredients and they are just an awesome company overall with great sustainability initiatives. I am so happy to have discovered Sweetgreen this year, too bad there isn't one in Chicago (yet!) My great friend, and fellow Sweetgreen lover, Mattie and I had the best time together enjoying our yummy salads!

Harvest bowl, the best!

Mattie and I!

It has been the best final week in Boston, finals and all! It has been so fun getting together with friends and saying goodbye for the summer! I can't wait for summer but there's so much to look forward to in coming back to school in the fall!

If you are anywhere in the Boston area, you must check some of these places out! Hope you are all having a great week!

xo,

Hannah 

Meeting My Favorite Baker!

Hi Everyone, it's Mary here! I am so excited to post for the first time! I just couldn’t wait to share with you about an awesome event I had the opportunity to attend last night! One of the bakeries/cafes Hannah and I LOVE frequenting in Boston is Flour Bakery, an adorable little café with a diverse menu ranging from freshly baked pastries and cakes to delicious sandwiches (on homemade bread!) and salads. Since its beginning in 2000, Flour already has four locations in Boston, and the owner Joanne Chang, a Harvard grad, has already published two cookbooks! Just yesterday,
Chang released a brand new book, Baking With Less Sugar, which I had been anticipating for many months! Though I love to bake, I have been significantly cutting back on sugar recently, and was so excited to see an entire book dedicated to using other natural sweeteners from my favorite bakery!

Chang (left) and Greenspan (right) sharing some of their best stories!

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend a Conversation and Q&A session not only with Joanne Chang herself, but also with distinguished baker Dorie Greenspan, author of six James Beard Award winning cookbooks! It was amazing to hear the two of them discuss their adventures in baking, from their first jobs to publishing their first cookbooks, as well as sharing some of their best tips and most important lessons! While Chang received a degree in Economics and Mathematics, she always had a passion for baking and became inspired to open up a bakery after a taking a “How to Open a Bakery” class at the same place I attended this event tonight, the Boston Center for Adult Education! What an incredible story!

Joanne Chang and I! 

After hearing many great stories and discussing many delicious recipes, everyone was invited to sample some delicious creations from both chefs! There were lots of little dessert samples presented so elegantly, it was so hard to choose what to try! I sampled Chang’s Carrot Pineapple Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, a recipe from her new cookbook that is sweetened only with apple juice and the fruit in the cake! It was absolutely delicious, I cannot wait to make it for my friends and family to try sometime soon!

    

 Limoncello Cupcakes from Greenspan’s book Baking Chez Moi

Mini Indian Pudding Cups (made with Molasses) from Chang’s Baking With Less Sugar

My new signed book! 

I’m so excited to embark upon all sorts of no sugar and low sugar baking adventures this summer! What types of sweeteners have you experimented with and been successful with? If you’re like me and love baking but want to cut back on sugar, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of Baking With Less Sugar as a great place to start!

Mary

Easter Weekend Fun!

I hope everyone had a Happy Easter! I just got back on campus a couple of hours ago after a crazy, fun-filled (but sadly short) trip home for Easter weekend! We were lucky enough to have Thursday and Friday of last week off, so Mary and I headed home early Thursday morning and had such a great time spent with family and friends! We did a bit of shopping, took some classes at our favorite fitness studio with Bailey, had some great food, baked some delicious goodies, and had a great Easter with lots of fun festivities.

In honor of our annual Easter baking project, Mary and I decided to make Easter/spring themed cupcakes to bring to our family's Easter dinner! A few weeks back in Palm Springs, I found the cutest cupcake liners and toppers made from William Sonoma made by Meri Meri, a company that sells adorable baking and party accessories! We used our favorite vanilla bean cupcake mix from Trader Joes and tried a new light and fluffy vanilla bean frosting recipe linked here. We decorated some of the cupcakes with the flower toppers from the Meri Meri kit, and others with Robin's Egg candies!

The beautiful cupcakes!

Easter cupcake cross!

In addition to the cupcakes, Mary and I wanted to try making chick macarons inspired by a couple of pins we had seen on Pinterest. We used this recipe for lemon macarons with a lemon buttercream and the flavors turned out just perfect! When making the macarons we used a macaron mat for the first time, which is a silicon baking mat with raised edges for helping pipe a consistent circle shape. While the macarons turned out alright, they were a little smaller and flatter than we would have liked! Lesson learned- our macarons from the past seemed to turn out better without the mat! We used food markers purchased from a local baking store for the eyes and feet, and turns out it was harder than we thought to draw them on without puncturing the macarons!

We always spend Easter at our grandparent's beautiful house and it was such a nice day with lots of fun and laughter! Here's a silly picture of my Easter getup- dress, sweater, and necklace from J. Crew Factory! 

It is crazy to think that Mary and I only have four more weeks left of school before finals! These next few weeks are jammed packed with activities, assignments, and babysitting and before we know it summer will be here! How crazy fast time seems to fly here at school!

I hope everyone has a great week! 

xo,

Hannah 

5 Things I'm Loving This Week

I hope everyone had a great week! I am very excited for this weekend, as I will be volunteering for the OWN IT Summit here at Boston College so thought I'd share some of my favorites from this week before the next two crazy days!

1. Lilly Pulitzer for Target Lookbook-
I had heard about the Lilly Pulitzer for Target collection a few months ago, and knew that it came out sometime mid-April. I did not know they would be publishing the lookbook in March, so was very very pleasantly surprised when I came across a link to the lookbook yesterday! Oh my, are some of the things cute! I need to get my hands on one of the dresses, and the navy espadrilles, and there are many other cute things from jewelry to totes to towels and home accessories! I am sure everything will sell out incredibly quickly on April 19th, but I am still going to try and snag a few things! Such a fun, happy collection!

2. Cauliflower Tacos Recipe from Design Love Fest- 
I occasionally check out the Design Love Fest website for cute and free desktop backgrounds, and was surprised when this week I stumbled upon this amazing looking recipe! I absolutely love cauliflower (and I like good tacos too..) and these look amazing! Using panko breaded cauliflower in place of taco meat is genius and the combination of cauliflower and the mango black bean salsa looks amazing! This one went on my recipe list right away!

3. Caitlin Wilson Textiles- 
Lately I've been doing some Pinterest searching for ideas on decorating the common room in my dorm next year, and my love for the happy and fun Caitlin Wilson textiles prints resurfaced big time! I had seen Pinterest pictures of Caitlin Wilson fabric in the past, but only recently discovered how much I love the bright colorful prints and patterns! Now I want to fill my room with colorful Caitlin Wilson pillows, and the custom headboards I have seen made with her fabric are gorgeous! Aren't these color and pattern combos just adorable?

So fun and colorful!

4. Public Greens Urban Kitchen-
Mary just found this place while browsing online and told me about it today! Public Greens is an amazingly cool "urban cafeteria and microfarm" in Indianapolis, Indiana where all the profits generated and go to the Patachou Foundation, a foundation that works to provide nutritious after schools to at-risk children! All the meat and produce from Public Greens is also locally sourced, and the menu really looks delicious! Sounds like such a cool place with great food for a great cause. If I'm ever in Indy Public Greens will be a must visit!

5. Wool Felt Flowers via MyCakies-
While browsing Pinterest this week, I also found a super cool spring craft that I will definitely have to attempt soon! These wool felt flowers are so fun, and I love the wreath idea!

                                                       I hope you all have a great weekend!

xo, 

Hannah