PRCHMNT by Stephen Andreo

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

THE SOCIAL SPOON

DIGITAL FARMERS MARKET

EMOTIONAL EATERS

SPICY PINK HAT CUPCAKE

COMFORT FOOD

CHANGE PIE DESIGN

RECIPIES

PATRICE SAKALOSKY

ABBEY PITZER

Journalist and non believer of spatulas

Art director and swell person

MADYSON SAMSEL

ERYN GRIFFIN

Writer and friend of all foods

Contributer and sports enthusiast

CHELSEY GLIDDEN

SEAN BIEGLER

Art Director and lover of rice

Contributer and local handyman

EDITOR Stephen Andreo

COPYWRITER Fig Nelson

Photographer Stephen Andreo Olivia Coleman

Activists Hilary Ouse Anna Brewer Harold Diaz George Smith Helen Day

Recipie Researchers Desmond Eagle

Hugh Saturation

In-House-Chef Stephen Andreo

Journalists Justin Case

Dianne Ameter

Project Managers Brenda Ross

Ann Young

Lance Bogrol

Are you tired of boring old magazines talking about simple cakes and motherhood. So are we and thats why we have PRCHMNT. No vowels? No, those clunky vowels were only taking up space and we don't have time for that. Today were talking about baking and more speciďŹ cally what the hell can baking do for us. Baking isn't just something for PTA bake sales and evening tea. I bet your also wondering what baking has to do with social causes . To that we say what dosent baking have to do with social causes. To us at PRCHMNT no one has proven that you can't solve a problem with cake and so we think its worth a shot. Baking is something that can get people together and have a good time. Unlike other things like boring meetings and presentations baking lets everyone get together and talk while making something you can eat and I think thats way better than not making something you can eat. Baking is something I have always enjoyed doing because its basically an edible science experiment. With a wide array of ďŹ&#x201A;avors you can create dam near anything you want to and no ones going to stop you. This is the approach we should be taking when we look at problems we face today as a society and thats why PRCHMNT exists. Everyone can bake to, its not limited to anything and that is why it is something that we can all connect over. Baking is something that is shared by all cultures and is a way we can all come together and enjoy something. Along with that there is nothing more exciting than taking the time to make a cke and than at the end being rewarded with an actual cake. Is there really anything more you could ask for in the world than a freshly baked cake?

Happy Baking, Stephen Andreo

THE SOCIAL SPOON Paul Fuentes Paul Fuentes is a graphic and editorial designer who lives in Mexico City, where he studied photography, design and art. Paul started making evocative images on his Instagram account using common objects to create idiosyncratic compositions, using minimalism, art pop and pastel colors, and he quickly gathered up a following. For each composition, he mashes up everyday objects to create a new, visual play on words, objects, and cultural associations. Through his artwork, Paul hopes to make people smile and remind them of the playful creativity they held were when they were young. He ďŹ nds inspiration to create in his own childhood wishes, mischiefs, and dreams.

Turnin ideas into a So full of new ideas, Paul Fuentes went back to Mexico. He started sketching and collecting pictures for inspiration. Also, he began to notice the trend of food photography on Instagram. He took the lock off of his account and started sharing his personal work, just to get some feedback perhaps. Suddenly, his account was booming! He got interview requests, people wanted to use his designs for advertising, and his followers kept on growing and growing. He says that he really didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect all of this to happen, but he knew: this was his calling, creating images of common food, objects and animals in a new and twisted way. And from this Paul Fuentes Design was born all from an Instagram account.

ng SNCAKE

ACID MUSIC

EGGPLOSION

SUGAR WORK

FLOWERS POPSICLE

TEATIME

About Fuentes

I want to make people happy. With a sushi-cat or a juicy hamburger, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my goal to break your boring Instagram feed and to get a smile on your face. I like to remind people how fascinating the world is by producing images of food, animals, and objects. These images are minimalistic mash-ups with pastel backgrounds and fun images.

@paulfuentes_design 13

FARMERS MARKET by Justin Case

The sheer scope of the challenges we face when it comes to food systems are well documented: economies of scale that emphasize quantity over quality, the use of technology to obscure and dehumanize production and sourcing, and the proliferation of big-box stores and their single-minded focus on the bottom line. So, how to create a sustainable food system in the face of a mounting population, changing weather patterns, and declining natural resources? For Kate Galassi, founder and former CEO of Quinciple, the answer lies in disrupting the traditional grocery store model. One among a growing number of “curated digital farmers’ markets,” Quinciple allows customers to shop on-line for fresh produce, dairy, fish, and meats. Groceries are harvested and packaged (in recycled materials) as soon as an order comes through. The company offers boxes of “omnivore,” “vegetarian,” “paleo,” and “vegan” fare, and this summer, Galassi’s subscribers can expect to select from fresh fruits and veggies including peaches, collard greens, chives, and fiddle-head ferns. There’s also Farm-to-People, an on-line food delivery marketplace sourcing specialty products from the Northeast; customers who live anywhere between New York and Washington, D.C., can order small-batch, handmade, organic, fair-trade local products and produce from the comfort of home. Founder David Robinov and his son run the company with a focus on environmental sustainability: All produce is GMO-free and all seafood is sustainably fished. Meats and eggs are free-range, and customers can track many products—such as jams and hot sauces—back to individual vendors. Another subscriptionbased start-up, Good Eggs, offers residents of California’s Bay Area smallbatch, locally sourced groceries and meal kits. This month, a “Dinner Bundle” features carnitas street tacos or cacio e pepe with spiralized zucchini (wine is included). Intrepid chefs can sign up for weekly meals, and first-time users can purchase a one-time crateful of artisan goods.

A New York Farmers Market

nor Hello Fresh has been committed to sourcing local produce,

as consumers increasingly seek on-demand solutions for food

and both are far from environmentally sustainable: Ingredients

shopping—solutions that, ideally, ensure freshness, eliminate

are individually packaged inside of plastic, boxes of food

waste, and allow for maximum ﬂexibility. While a visit to the local

are often transported long distances in diesel-powered trucks,

farmers’ market is an experience that can’t be replicated online,

and distribution centers require non-renewable energy to be

digital farmers’ markets offer more transparency than traditional

able to refrigerate stored products. Clearly,n these problems

brick-and-mortar grocery stores like Albertsons or Walmart.

aren’t unique to cooking subscription boxes or even digital

Consumers can easily pull back the curtain on ingredients,

marketplaces. But when consumers are more concerned with

provenance, and practices. Digital marketplaces can also provide

calories than with carbon footprints, big businesses seek few

better access to those living in “food deserts”—communities

incentives to become ecofriendly.

where fresh produce and other nutritious fare is difﬁcult to obtain. The objective: a safer, more efﬁcient food industry, with better

In migrating farm stands to the Web, however, farmers could

opportunities to support local businesses and farmers.

maximize sales by digitizing their operations. In allowing shoppers to make purchases with credit cards or scanned QR

“While a visit to the local farmers’ market is an experience that

codes, they can capture data to ﬁne-tune their selling—and even

can’t be replicated online, digital farmers’ markets offer more

growing—strategies. The recent merger of Whole Foods Market

transparency than traditional brick-and-mortar grocery stores

and Amazon already hints at supermarket owners’ efforts to

like Albertsons or Walmart. Consumers can easily pull back the

leverage data analytics and other digital tools to boost customer

curtain on ingredients, provenance, and practices.” While digital

service—but, in doing so, corporate giants put enormous price

farmers’ markets show a lot of potential, this budding industry

pressures on small vendors. Thanks to digital farmers’ markets,

is not without its challenges. “We were focused on the customer

such farmers can theoretically position their harvests for a future

experience, at the expense of margins,” Galassi explains,

not dependent on big-box buyers seeking a steady supply of

referring to Quinciple’s initial struggle for proﬁtability. “We

cheap goods, but rather through small-scale, local e-commerce

weren’t worried about differentiating ourselves from meal kits.”

businesses with a vested interest in protecting growers.

Indeed, large-scale meal-kit services like Blue Apron and Hello

Experts predict the food system of the future will be complex: a

Fresh have landed on a delivery model that’s both ﬁnancially

combination of industrial and urban agriculture, small-scale farms,

sustainable and broad in geographic reach: these operations

vertical growing spaces, hydroponics, backyard gardening, and

are able to offer 24/7 service and quick delivery turnaround by

community gardening. Digital grocery marketplaces could play a

creating scalable efﬁciencies (getting food locally, and arranging

role in hastening the decentralization of food and the elimination

pick-up points at distribution centers instead of delivery) and

of hunger and food waste—effecting a global transformation of

by gauging supply and demand. However, neither Blue Apron

production and consumption.

FRESH

Start-ups like these highlight changes in the supermarket model

18 BON VIVANT The Bon Vivant online market has a huge variety of produce and many other types of goods — including grass-fed meats, milk, honey, coffee, and even doggie treats — from a variety of area farms and producers. They also have a standout web site in the sense that it makes the online buying process (which is new to many consumers who are used to going to the farmers market in person) very straight-forward; one visit to their home page instantly puts a new online shopper at ease when he sees their simple 3-step “browse, buy, delivered” procedure. But their best feature? Home and ofﬁce deliveries.

RUSTY TRACTOR FARM MARKET With a goal to “offer you the best handmade and home-grown food, and the ability to be able to buy it easily all year ’round,” the Rusty Tractor Farm sells the usual farmers market ﬁnds, along with farming tools and prepared foods. But what stands out most about them is their beautifully designed website that is extremely easy to use. The homepage launches the user right into the shopping experience with great photography and easy-to-ﬁnd shopping categories.

ZESTY

FARMINGO Our mission is to create a better food system, that’s better for the eaters and better for the farmers. The way we do this is we connect the farms directly with the consumers. That enables us to pass on 60 percent of what the consumer pays directly to the grower or the maker of the food, and it allows the consumers to get their food direct from harvest, so that it is fresher than anything they can get at the supermarket. They have full accountability of where their food is coming from.

LUNASA Set up to be a one-stop shop for locavores, this site is up-front with its mission to “Make Local Easy.” Its cool factor comes from the fact that along with a great selection of in-season produce, they also offer locally made crafts and other interesting items that make perfect gifts, such as not-youraverage beverages and household goods.

RED HILLS

STAR HOLLOW FARMS Star Hollow started out selling their goods through the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, where customers pay an up-front fee in the early season for a weekly box of freshly harvested produce. But in response to the growing number of CSA customers who wanted to choose exactly what they got in the box each week, farmers Randy and Chris Treichler planted the seed for an online market in 2003. Star Hollow Farms is now an online CSA where customers pay $300 up-front in store credit, which they can then use up with each online order to get the speciﬁc produce they want.

Online shoppers sign up for $10 per year on this site to buy anything from preserved foods and mushrooms to seeds, plant starts to grow on your own, and produce. Although this is a smaller model compared to some other online markets, it’s a downhome site that’s clearly a dedicated, collaborative effort from small farms in the area to get the best produce possible onto Florida tables.

ONLINE FARMERS MARKETS FARMER GIRLS When local farmers Deborah Williamson and Deanna Child noticed a disconnect between local produce and the local consumers who should have been buying it, they decided to sell their stuff online. The pair even took things a step further by developing custom software for other farmers to follow suit online. Now, with this easy-to-use online market (that’s also one of the best looking sites out there), they sell a huge variety of goods from local farmers and producers.

MOORE FARMS & FRIENDS This market has a huge variety of items, from flowers and pet products to fruit and veggies. What makes it truly cool is instead of being run by one owner, it’s a collaborative marketing effort among area farms. The farmers are all small-scale sustainable, certified naturally grown, and USDA Certified Organic food producers who came together to conveniently get their products to the people.

WILDKALE Just like at an open-air farmers market, at Wildkale you can buy fresh food directly from your best local farms. The difference is that you can order the freshest, best tasting local food online, and the food is delivered in sustainable packaging directly from the farm to your doorstep overnight. As a true farmers market, Wildkale has no middlemen, food warehouses, or other lengthy distribution channels. The only warehouse is the farmer’s barn.

FIELD DAY FARMS Farmer Mariann Van Den Elzen’s online market has accelerated the community’s locavore culture through convenience. She sells her own produce along with that of many others, so people can get their meat, eggs, and veggies in one place. Always changing to accommodate customer needs — for instance she just started taking online payments — Field Day Farms also sends out a handy email reminder each week, complete with news from the farm and recipes for seasonal produce. Field Day Family Farm is considered to be part of this move toward greater communication and involvement between producer and consumer.

EMOTIONAL EATER by Dianne Ameter

Can baking have an effect on your overall mental health?

SAVORY

Whether you’re an avid baker, or simply reap the benefits of knowing one, we can all agree that baking is about more than creating something sweet to eat. In fact, according to Donna Pincus, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, baking, especially for others, can have incredible psychological benefits. “There’s a lot of literature for connection between creative expression and overall wellbeing. Whether it’s painting or it’s making music [or baking], there is a stress relief that people get from having some kind of an outlet and a way to express themselves,” Pincus tells Huffington Post. Stress Is Just Desserts Spelled Backwards We all experience varying degrees of stress throughout the day due to a multitude of mental, physical, and environmental challenges. In order to live a happy and healthy lifestyle, it’s important to have to go to coping mechanisms that help alleviate some of the worry and anxiety, ultimately relieving stress. For many people, baking is a “go to” coping mechanism as it allows them to shift their focus to the recipe, and indulge in their creativity. When baking for other people, baking can also be a helpful way to communicate one’s feelings. This, according to Susan Whitbourne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, can likely be attributed to the cultural norm of bringing food to someone when a loved one has passed. It says everything you need to say when there aren’t adequate words. “It can be helpful for people who have difficulty expressing their feelings in words to show thanks, appreciation or sympathy with baked goods” Whitbourne explains.

Licensed clinical social worker and culinary art therapist, Julie Ohana, echoes that sentiment. “In many cultures, in many countries, food really is an expression of love, and it’s actually beautiful because it’s something we really all relate to. I think it could border on an unhealthy issue when it replaces communication in the traditional sense, but if it’s done along with communication, it is absolutely a positive and really wonderful thing.” Baking is a form of mindfulness. Practicing Meditation and mindfulness have been found to increase happiness and reduce stress, and for many people, baking IS a form of mindfulness.“Baking actually requires a lot of full attention. You have to measure, focus physically on rolling out the dough. If you’re focusing on smell and taste, on being present with what you’re creating, that act of mindfulness in that present moment can also have a result in stress reduction,” explains Pincus. Baking ﬁts into a type of therapy known as behavioral activation, often used to treat depression. “Baking is thinking step-by-step and following the speciﬁcs of the here and now, but it’s also thinking about recipes as a whole, the dish as a whole, what are going to do with it, who it’s going to, what time are you sharing it, so baking is a really good way of developing that balance of the moment and the bigger picture,” says Ohana. Pincus said that when that being mindful - such as when you bake - it can mean “you’re not spending time ruminating over your thoughts, we know that rumination leads to depression and sad thoughts if you’re doing something productive.

STRESSED

DESSERTS The nice thing about baking is that you have such a tangible reward at the end and that can feel very beneficial to others. Baking for others is selfless. While the process of baking can contribute to an overall sense of well-being, giving heightens that feeling. In fact, the joy of gifting their creations is what many bakers enjoy most. “Baking for others can increase a feeling of wellbeing, contribute to stress relief and make you feel like you’ve done something good for the world, which perhaps increases your meaning in life and connection with other people,” Pincus told HuffPost. From measuring and whisking to baking and serving, laboring over a recipe from start to finish with the intent of giving is a selfless act that has been heavily studied and written about for decades. In fact, there’s long been an appreciation of the physical and emotional significance associated with baking for others. “The most benefits would accrue when you bake not to seek attention or to out-do others, but when you just want to share the food with people who you believe will appreciate it. As long as you’re good at what you bake,” said Whitbourne. So, should we be baking even if we don’t find pleasure in it? Not necessarily. If baking stresses you out, then you might not reap the same rewards as others. “If someone has a phobia with cooking and baking, it’s not for them. It’s better for people who start off with a baseline comfort level in the kitchen,” says Ohana. Pincus agrees: “As long as it’s not stressful and not obligatory, it can be beneficial for all.”

SPICY P PINK CY PINK HAT C K HAT CUP AT

PINK HA KK HAT C CUPCAK PCAKE S A LOOK AT THE 2018 WOMENS MARCH

A stranger called Stacy Shilling her "hero” on Saturday. Dozens of others asked to take a photo of her. That’s because Shilling was donning a “Women’s March on Philadelphia” hat and wearing a sign around her neck that read: “Nobody asks what my rapist was wearing.”

Shilling, a 27-year-old from Green Lane, Montgomery County, was sexually assaulted four years ago by a man she’d met through mutual friends, but she said it was the process of going to the police that “re traumatized” her. Those “victim-blaming” questions – “What were you wearing? How much did you drink? Are you sure you didn’t lead him on?” – are why she attended Saturday’s second Women’s March on Philadelphia. “I have my voice back,” she said. “And I want to help other women ﬁnd their voice, too.”

Thousands of women converged on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on Saturday morning for the 2018 version of the Women’s March on Philadelphia, the local iteration of a national movement aimed at protesting for women’s rights and, largely, against President Trump and the Republican Party.

Last year’s Women’s March on Washington, which took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, involved half a million women and was one of the largest protests ever recorded. About 50,000 women marched in the 2017 Women’s March on Philadelphia, which was then dubbed a “sister march” of the Washington event on diversity and inclusion.

story by Fig Nelson

SPICY PINK HAT CUPCAKES

Cupcakes 1

box Betty Crocker™ SuperMoist™ white cake mix

cup bottled strawberry margarita or daiquiri mix

¹⁄₃

cup vegetable oil

¹⁄₄

cup tequila

3 egg whites or whole eggs

¹⁄₈

1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)

3 teaspoons ancho chile pepper powder

Frosting ¹⁄₂

cup shortening

¹⁄₂

cup butter, softened

(1 lb) box powdered sugar (4 cups)

tablespoons bottled strawberry margarita or daiquiri mix

SPICY

STEPS

Time

Makes

1 HR 30 MIN

24 cupcakes For Frosting

For Cupcakes

Step

In large bowl, beat shortening and butter with electric mixer on low speed until smooth.

Heat oven to 350°F (325°F for dark or nonstick pans). Place foil or baking cup in each of 24 regular-size mufﬁn cups

In a large bowl, beat all cupcake ingredients with electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds. Next beat on a medium speed 2 minutes, scraping bowl. Divide batter among mufﬁn cups.

Gradually add the powdered until combined.

Next add 1 tablespoon of the margarita mix and than beat until blended.

Add enough of the remaining 1 to 2 tablespoons margarita mix, 1 teaspoon at a time, beating until frosting is light and ﬂuffy.

Step

Decorating

Step

Bake 18 to 23 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 10 minutes; remove cupcakes from pans to cooling racks. Cool completely.

Spoon frosting into decorating bag ﬁtted with #1M star tip; pipe frosting in circular pattern on cupcakes. Garnish with a sprinkle of salt and lime slices.

If we can make a difference, we should

Women's March on Philadelphia Women of color who attended the march said a lack of diversity wasn’t a reason to stay home. For them, it was the reason to show up. Shayna Dozier and Alexis Snyder, both students at Philadelphia UniversityThomas Jefferson University who are originally from York, Pa., said they attended Saturday’s demonstration to ﬁght for racial justice. Dozier, 18, said she missed last year’s march – this time, she felt she “had” to attend.

year’s Women’s March wasn’t inclusive of women of color. She said those worries are part of the reason she was there. The march “is focused on women,” she said. “That means all women.” Cheers erupted during the march portion of the event while Jamie Williams was leading a chant. The 17-year-old from Blue Bell held a sign that read “Black Girls Rising,” and chanted with friends about being strong, smart, and bold.

“If we can make a difference, we should” Snyder, 19, said.

She was there with about a dozen other girls who are part of the local chapter of the Girls Incorporated program, a national organization that aims to empower young women.

Dozier, who is black and sported a “Black Lives Matter” button, said she’s heard concerns that last

“As girls of color, it’s important to get our voices inside this movement,” she said, adding that she aspires to one day become a computer engineer – but not for herself. Williams wants to one day run an organization aimed exclusively at teaching minority girls how to code and program. Another group of young women was close by – this one called Camp Sojourner, a leadership camp in Philadelphia that serves about 80 girls. Their ages ranged from 8 to 17, every summer. Alisha Berry, 43, the director of the camp, said it serves largely girls of color – which is why it was important to bring a contingent to the march. “We’re bringing our girls out,” she said, “so we could make the space what we want it to be.”One of the girls who served by Camp Sojourner is actualy now an intern with the company, giving back to other young women.

Princess Rahman, 18, of the Oxford Circle section of the city, said she attended last year’s march and couldn’t wait to come back this year.“There’s always a fight,” she said, “for equality for women.” Saturday’s event also featured a healthy contingent of local politicians, including City Councilwomen Jannie Blackwell, Cherelle Parker and Maria QuiñonesSánchez, as well as the newly sworn-in Rebecca Rhynhart, Philadelphia’s first female city controller. Rhynhart spoke to the crowd about her unlikely bid, saying she was inspired to run after Trump’s election. “When you see a wrong in the world, stand up and resist. When someone tells you you can’t, stand up and persist,” she said. “We must be bold, and we must be brave.” But Rhynhart wasn’t able to stick around long after her short speech. She had to leave to get her hair done. Her wedding was less than five hours away.

Agnodice 400BC Greece Recognized as one of the ﬁrst female gynecologists, Agnodice is said to have practiced medicine in Greece when women faced the death penalty for doing so. Eventually caught, she was vindicated and allowed to continue when patients came to her defense.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 1961 Mexico Following criticism for studying secular texts, celebrated writer and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico memorably defended women’s rights to education in 1691 by proclaiming “one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper." A national icon, today she appears on Mexican currency.

A Walk Through HERstory A look at the footprint that women have left in hisory

Kate Sheppard

Anna Filosofova

1893 New Zealand New Zealand’s most celebrated suffragist, Kate Sheppard along with fellow campaigners presented a “monster” petition to Parliament demanding women’s suffrage with nearly 32,000 signatures — an instrumental move that led to New Zealand becoming the ﬁrst self-governing country to grant national voting rights to women in 1893.

1860 Russia Ahead of her time, prominent women’s rights activist and Russian philanthropist Anna Filosofova believed it was better to educate and train the poor rather than provide cash beneﬁts. In 1860, she cofounded a society to provide support to the poor, including not only affordable housing but also decent work for women.

Rosalind Franklin

Doria Shaﬁk

1951 United Kingdom In 1951, British chemist Rosalind Franklin paved the way for the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure through the revolutionary use of X-ray diffraction. Franklin captured the critical photo evidence through 100 hours of extremely ﬁne beam X-ray exposure from a machine she had reﬁned.

1951 Egypt Doria Shaﬁk catalyzed a women’s rights movement in Egypt when in 1951 she, alongside 1,500 women, stormed parliament demanding full political rights, pay equality and reforms to personal status laws. These efforts helped pave the way to women’s right to vote in 1956.

Unity Dow

Vandana Shiva

1992 Botswana As a plaintiff, Unity Dow won a historic case in 1992 enabling women married to non-citizens the right to confer nationality to their children. Later, as Botswana's ﬁrst female High Court judge, she gained international acclaim on a case that allowed Botswana’s San people to return to their ancestral homelands.

1990 India A staunch environmentalist, Vandana Shiva formed Navdanya in India during the early 1990s to conserve unique strains of seed crops and to educate farmers on ecodiversity. Under Navdanya, she also created a programme on biodiversity, food and water, which empowers women in protecting the livelihoods of their communities.

Rigoberta Menchú

Billie Jean King

1960 Guatemala The ﬁrst indigenous person to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Rigoberta Menchú campaigned for social justice, ethno-cultural reconciliation and indigenous peoples’ rights. In 2006, she co-founded the Nobel Women's Initiative to magnify women’s work on peace, justice and equality

1973 USA A pioneering American tennis champion and social change activist, Billie Jean King famously threatened to boycott the U.S. Open in 1973 unless women were given equal prize money — a demand that was met, making the U.S. Open the ﬁrst major tournament of its kind to offer pay equality.

You Today With every new day the ability to shape the world comes with it. As many have before it is everyones responsibility to work towards creating a better world for the women of our society. Every person has the duty to make sure that they are doing what they can to help future women of the world to live better lives. While we may not always know how it is important to know that we all have the ability to make a change in the world. Nothing is to small or insigniďŹ cant especially in this day and age. The smallest gesture can lead to the greatest change. We must live our lives with compasion and understanding so that we can move forward and continue what the amazing women in history have already done.

M O FORT C O O D F B SWEET DESSERT BAR by Lance Bogrol

It is easy to give back when you love what you do. Just ask Chef Barb Batiste, the founder of West LAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s B Sweet Bar. Barb spreads happiness in her community by sharing her love of baking with local schools, temples and churches in LA. Barb grew up in a close-knit, FilipinoSpanish family where she developed not only skills in baking, but an inherent quality of sharing and giving to others. B Sweet Dessert Bar has even earned a reputation as the best neighbor on the block: they donate baked goods to their next door neighbor and landlord, the West Lost Angeles Buddhist Temple, every year for their Obon Festival. She also supports local small businesses by offering reduced rates for catering. You can contact B Sweet Bar directly to ďŹ nd out more about how you can get involved and volunteer.

About B Sweet B Sweet was created to bring back the homemade taste in cakes, cookies, pies and many other pastries. This young company has an unmatched level of quality in its products, and it clearly shows not only through its presentation but also in its taste. Individual handwork and attention to detail enables B Sweet to produce fresher and more authentic ﬂavors then pastries produced in larger corporate kitchens. Using the highest quality ingredients such as fresh fruits purchased from the local farmer’s market make up its “yummy factor”. Our dedication to quality and customer satisfaction is incomparable to those larger companies. If your palette is craving mouth watering and heartwarming baked goods, B Sweet offers the best selection.

About thhe Chef Barb still works off many of her handwritten recipes, Barb Batiste is the owner and founder of B Sweet and together with her committed team they strive to Catering. Raised in an extremely close-knit Filipino create new recipes daily with an old-fashioned flair. family, she recalls the weekend gatherings at her parent’s home and being the one to cook all of the food These values have brought her many loyal clients such as Disney, Nike, ING Direct and some of Hollywood’s and desserts. From pies, to cookies, to layered cakes, best known stars and studios. Most recently, B Sweet she wowed everyone. released its extensive sweet and savory World Menu. In 1993 she worked alongside the Executive Pastry Chef Barb launched two of Los Angeles’ cutest dessert Chef at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel creating fine pastries; and though it was a great experience, her trucks known simply as B Sweet Mobile. Look for Lil Angel and Lil Devil roaming the streets of LA now. heart was still set on making homemade goodies the old-fashioned way. She quickly created a buzz around personal friends and family, and even started supplying Chef Barb’s B Sweet Bread Pudding will be back in store freezers nationwide soon!!! Check back for our her famous Chocolate Chip Banana Bread to a local café. After working as the head pastry chef for an LA “Store Locator” tool! Art Gallery and polishing her skills, she decided to start What’s next for this dedicated wife and mother who her own catering company. thinks of herself as a modern day “Betty Crocker?” Well, Chef Barb’s first brick and mortar shop, the B From her kitchen at home, to now her third commercial kitchen, she continues to grow and remains true to her Sweet Dessert Bar, is now open in West Los Angeles with a possible second shop opening soon! “handmade like grandma used to make” ways.

YUM

CHERRY

by MADYSON SAMSEL

On a sun-splashed afternoon in August, blueberry pies and peach pies cooled on wire racks inside PieLab, a white brick cafe with ﬂoor-to-ceiling windows on Main Street in Greensboro, Ala. Behind a counter made of planks salvaged from abandoned sharecropper shacks, two young women slid pie tins into a double oven stack as if almost in unison. At trestle tables, beneath industrial pendant lights, four young men, on lunch break from their G.E.D. classes, dug into slices of taco pie and made weekend plans. If there was any thought that this was just a typical small-town cafe, the blue ﬂag above the front door dispelled the notion. As the fabric rippled in the breeze, the words inscribed at the edges came into view: “Pie & Conversation, Optimism & Design.” Pie might be served inside, but this cafe aspired to something more than any other of its kind. Founded by a design collective known as Project M, PieLab came to life last year as a combo pop-up cafe, design studio and civic clubhouse. Greensboro, the 2,700-person seat of Hale County, might seem like an odd place for a group of well-intentioned young graphic-designers to set up a cafe for design and civic issues. Situated in the Black Belt, a former cotton-producing region where the soil is dark and rich, Hale County appeared to be a lost cause. About one-third of the children in the area there live in poverty. In 2002, The Birmingham News called the Black Belt “Alabama’s Third World.” How could the baking and serving of pie help tackle things that are in entrenched social and economic ills?

Project M aimed to answer just such questions. Part of what has become known as the “design for good” movement, Project M was established by a designer named John Bielenberg in 2003. Based in Belfast, Me., it functions as a kind of idea incubator, where young designers are invited to two-week programs to generate solutions to social problems and enhance public life. Since 2007, Project M has been operating regularly in Greensboro.

PieLab opened in a makeshift space on a Greensboro side street in May of last year. Five of the original Project M team members in Maine had come south at the invitation of the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization (HERO), a housingadvocacy nonproﬁt, which also sponsored communityminded local initiatives. The Project M team conceived of their pie shop as a pop-up — a temporary cafe — describing it as a “negative-energy inverter, fueled by pie.”

One of Project M’s most successful projects in the area, Buy-a-Meter, was built around a series of pamphlets that helped raise money to hook up area residents to running water. Bielenberg, a contrarian who likes to challenge participants to “reject linear thought pathways,” had turned to food before to promote other forms of social change. In Connecticut, Project M and a design group named Winterhouse held an event by the name of Pizza Farm, inviting the local farmers to an area park and using their produce to make pizza for residents, while educating them about where their food could come from.

The term “pop-up” implies that a concept may be too cutting-edge to sustain. And so it was with PieLab. No one expected this pop-up to last, least of all the designers who transformed the original space in a breakneck three-week stretch and managed it with gusto for the rest of the spring and summer. But that ﬁrst day at the PieLab was a success. There was music, courtesy of a customer. The crowd was diverse, ideas were exchanged. Intergenerational friendships were forged. The take, at two bucks per apple-pie slice, was something like $400.

PieLab ﬁrst began to take shape in March 2009 at a bar in Belfast, where 14 members of Project M gathered over burgers and beer. “We realized that we couldn’t solve global warming,” recalled Megan Deal, a native of suburban Detroit, who was a recent college graduate. “And we couldn’t ﬁx the plummeting economy. Before pie came to us, we were kind of paralyzed.”

PieLab had visual style. And PieLab had a formula, a back-of-the-bar-napkin equation, sketched in Maine and reﬁned on the ground in Greensboro: Ideas + design= Conversation Ideas + design = Positive Change. A neutral place + a slice of pie = PieLab A neutral place + a slice of pie = Conversation.

They started out small. Their ﬁrst foray was Free Pie Day, during which Project M members stood on a Belfast street corner and handed out slices of pecan pie, pumpkin pie and apple pie to passers-by. The idea was to spur community and conversation, one slice at a time. Free Pie Day inspired similar efforts in Washington, Brooklyn and elsewhere. Most important, it inspired PieLab. “WHEN I SAW THEM out front, I walked over,” Charles Johnson, a beauty-shop owner, said. “I saw the sign” — the one that spelled out LAB with stainless-steel pegs and washers — “and I asked, ‘Is this some kind of space-center stuff?’ ”

Yet for all its ambition, PieLab never had a business plan or a ﬁrm grasp on what sort of change was sought. This was intentional. Bielenberg wasn’t much interested in long-term goals; he believed in setting something in motion and letting the momentum guide the effort. The plan was simply to open PieLab’s door and have conversations with the people of Greensboro to create progressive inititatives of their own. “We had an idea,” said Brian W. Jones, a collaborator from Virginia. “That was it. We opened without a business license or the complete approval of the health inspector.”

PieLab’s logo — two crimp-crusted pie slices, positioned tip to tip to form a double beaker, an hourglass or some other old-school scientific apparatus — said it all. Here food wasn’t just fuel. And design wasn’t merely a way to arrange your living room furniture. Design, when applied to food, could be a catalytic force for good, even if the good wasn’t specified. PieLab operated out of temporary quarters for four months. HERO, under the direction of Pam Dorr, served as host and landlord. Six years earlier, Dorr left a job as a production manager for the Gap in California to join the social-service efforts in Hale County. Dorr collaborated with Project M on earlier projects, finding practical applications for their ideas. To support PieLab, she secured government grants, helped build ties in the community and served as a hands-off adviser. That first PieLab space, in a tin-roofed clapboard home behind the HERO offices, was spare and studied, with glossy white walls, high ceilings and open shelving. A hand-cranked cash register sat on the front counter, alongside a silverware tray. Inscribed with the names and check-out histories of old books, the cards served as sketch pads and, on occasion, order pads for $3 slice-and-coffee combos.

The earnestness was palpable. The Project M crew baked pie after pie and brewed opious amounts of coffee. They crimped crusts with forks and piled on pears and pecans gathered and delivered by neighbors. They designed Web sites for the Hale County Humane Society and created logos for the nearby city of Northport.For the socially engaged members of Project M, PieLab was a clubhouse. For small-town characters, it was a magnet. College students from Sewanee, Tenn., ate through all the pecan pie one afternoon. A film director just back from Thailand came in for coffee and talked about his next project, a Big Foot horror movie. Over time, the Project M folk befriended Scott Hamilton, an aspiring artist. They designed a Web site on which he posted his paintings of cities of the future, shaped like skyscraping minarets. When Charles Johnson, a regular, was in a good mood, he performed on the pine floors, moving to a line-dance routine called the Cupid Shuffle. Within a few months of opening the shop, following a spate of positive design-industry press, PieLabinspired efforts popped up in cities like Portland, Ore. In Greenville, Ala., southwest of Montgomery, Nancy Rhodes recently opened Polka Dots Café, cater-corner from the town’s Confederate memorial.

All this attention to social ills did not come without social costs. Almost 75 years have passed since Agee and Evans traveled the county to document the lives of poor white folk, but their work still has the power to inﬂame residents. If outsiders see Evans’s photos and Agee’s text as a candid examination of an ailing region, insiders often see the book as the product of crusading interlopers, the sort of people who parachute into the region today with little understanding of local concerns. Amanda Buck is not the only Project M collaborator who has walked into the Hale County Library on Main Street to check out “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and learned that lesson. “Everybody who comes down here wants to read that book,” Buck recalled a librarian saying as she handed her a copy. “ You know this doesn’t paint the whole picture. There are other perspectives.”

She serves kolaches, a Czech pastry popular in Texas. Inspired by PieLab, she plans to operate a “neutral space,” where people of all races and classes can gather.

BUCK, A NATIVE OF Brunswick, Ohio, who was a member of the original 2009 Project M program and later traveled south to work at PieLab, showed up thinking that she was to be a “change agent.” But when she talked about change, many Hale County residents heard condemnation. No matter, she thought. “What are we doing here if we’re not working for change?”

“THAT FIRST SPACE was really grass roots,” Megan Deal recalled. “It was so easy to build, so easy to run. There was an honesty about it, a purity. It was all about pie and conversation. All about what we intended. It worked.” More signiﬁcant, it seemed to work in the Black Belt, a region that a New York Times writer, in the days before the cotton economy went bust, described as a “garden of slavery.” Poverty rates may register higher in other counties in the region, and racial disparities have proved wider, but Hale County has long been the Black Belt’s front porch. Hale was where James Agee and Walker Evans drew their famed portrait of Depression-era tenant farmer life, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” And Hale was where Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth established the Rural Studio, a design-and-build program for Auburn University architecture students, focused on creating highconcept, low-cost homes for indigent residents. Don’t be “house pets to the rich,” Mockbee told his charges, sounding a clarion that inspired, among others, John Bielenberg.

In the Black Belt, Project M collaborators could afford to be idealists. They worked hard, but their lives unspooled like summer-camp deferments. “On weekends we swam in the river,” Brian Jones recalled. “We wandered down Main Street at sunset and admired the way the light bounced off the buildings.” They ate lunches of fried whiting and fried okra at Flava, a soul-food cafe set in a brick compound one block off Main Street. And they listened as Eugene Lyles, who built the restaurant in the 1960s, told them that, back when the black-power movement was ascendant, he was an idealist, too. Weekday afternoons, they walked the town, past shuttered storefronts. At night, they sometimes played foursquare games on Main Street, sidestepping pulpwood trucks as they downshifted from the highway.

48 They measured success in modest exchanges. Buck and Robin Mooty, another early PieLab worker, designed and painted a new sign for Charles Johnson’s salon. In return, Johnson took Buck and Deal golfing. PieLab efforts played well to the news media. Here was hope, and apple pie, and a seemingly robust new economic engine in the Black Belt, a seemingly hopeless American place. And here was an effort that aligned nicely with the national trend toward food activism. “PieLab provides a neutral environment in a traditionally segregated town where people from every race and class are welcome to sit together and talk candidly about whatever is on their mind,” Brian Jones told Fast Company magazine. PieLab, along with projects like Mission Pie in San Francisco (which employs at-risk youth and uses local ingredients for its pies), is part of an American movement to deploy food-focused initiatives, including restaurant operation and artisanal food production, to foster social change. The culinary establishment embraced PieLab. The magazine Southern Living, the prevailing arbiter of middle-class regional taste, dubbed its apple pie one of the South’s best. The James Beard Foundation named the Main Street PieLab space one of three 2010 finalists for its restaurant design award. All the attention buoyed the PieLab collaborators. But it also created problems. When Project M first arrived in Greensboro, some folk bristled at the language it employed. The conflicts began with the 2007 Buy-aMeter project. To get the initiative under way, Project M used stark black-and-white photos (and starker messages) to draw attention to area families who lacked access to the municipal water supply. The pamphlet campaign raised about $50,000. HERO, working in conjunction with Project M, used this money to purchase and install more than 100 water meters. Beyond Alabama, Buy-a-Meter was celebrated as a financial and critical success. But back home, the slogan — “In Hale County, Alabama, Water Is Not a Right,” splayed across a gatefold photograph of Greensboro’s Main Street — did not always play so

well. Tensions increased when a group of designers proposed a National Design Center for Rural Poverty Programs in Greensboro. To make clear the need, they described Hale County as a place where an “impoverished population suffers from substandard housing, education, health care and job opportunities.” In Greensboro, such sweeping generalizations, no matter their accuracy, stung. “What does some guy in Maine know about my life in Alabama?” asked Ann Langford, chief clerk of the Hale County Probate Court and onetime Rural Studio administrator. “Who gave him the right to speak for us?” By that point, a number of new voices were speaking for the Black Belt. At least seven windmill-tilting organizations were doing good works in Hale County, including Project Horseshoe Farm, a residential mental-health facility. Those programs brought youthful energy to Greensboro. They also brought trouble. “You have the same town-and-gown tensions here that you would ﬁnd in a small Massachusetts college town,” said Winnie Cobbs, a retired college professor who operates a local bed-and-breakfast in the near by area. As she sontinued to talked, two young women, wearing jogging bras and tank tops that had a college mascot on it , race-walked through downtown. Inside PieLab, a Horseshoe Farm fellow hunched over her laptop, ﬁlling out many different medical-school application forms.

“It’s universal,” Cobbs said. “You hear the same talk about the loose morals of young kids. And you hear the same suspicion of the motives of outsiders.” “I WAS NAÏVE,” BUCK SAID. “I knew nothing about baking pies and running a business.”As Buck talked, she squirmed in her chair in what was the original pop-up PieLab space and is now used by AmeriCorps Vista volunteers who run BikeLab. “We came with preconceived notions about what we would ﬁnd in Alabama,” she said.

“The humor might have played well in Brooklyn,” Buck said, taking pains to explain that the posters were never intended for local distribution. “But here it wasn’t funny at all.”

In October 2009, as the PieLab crew worked to refurbish their new brick-fronted space on Main Street — the one with polished wood ﬂoors and a balloonwhisk bathroom light ﬁxture — tensions reached a pitch in what came to be known as the “cake thing” or the “poster incident.”

“I understand what they intended,” Winnie Cobbs said. “It was playful and frivolous. I got the Marie Antoinette reference. It takes us back to the time of the French Revolution. But you have to pick your place to use that word. And posters, plastered around this town, would not have been that place.”

Designed by a couple of the PieLab workers, the poster was printed in an array of colors, the most arresting of which was bright red. Rendered in a bold, black font and capped by an exclamation point, were the words: “Eat pie.” Stacked beneath, in far smaller type, was a command that began with a sexually explicit four-letter word and ended with the word “cake.”

Ann Langford still keeps a rolled copy beneath her desk at the courthouse. “I can’t take a poster with that word on it home,” she said. Langford understands youthful indiscretion. Yet she still gets agitated when she talks about the incident.

Posters quickly found their way into the hands of city and county powerbrokers. Things came to a head during a heated conversation in the street, which Pam Dorr, of HERO, playfully described as a “near riot.”

“So is that the best that you can come up with after going off to college?” she asked a group of PieLab workers who came to apologize. “Is that what your parents sent you to school to learn? I thought y’all were supposed to set examples.”

To the PieLab crew, the poster was an over-thetop exercise in sloganeering. To members of the Greensboro community, who followed the workings of PieLab on various Web sites, the document was a totem of the group’s cultural insensitivities.

THREE MONTHS HAVE now passed since “the takeover.” That’s the term that Pam Dorr uses.

50 Her technique was simple: Rather than renew some of the governmental programs under which the original crew was employed, Dorr allowed certain sources of ﬁnancing to lapse. One by one, the founders departed. Under Dorr’s leadership, PieLab may still realize some of the transformative goals.

Early in the process, PieLab began working with YouthBuild, a job-training-and-remedial-education program, afﬁliated with the U.S. Department of Labor. At ﬁrst, 20-somethings from programs like that were ancillary to the PieLab effort. Now job training appears to be primary. Some of the changes have been more pragmatic. PieLab no longer opens at 9 in the morning, as it did when the Project M crew ran the show. Gone are the stacks of take-one, leaveone cards with recipes for graduate-student fodder like tofu stroganoff. Gone, too, is the pie-only menu. PieLab now serves homemade biscuits at 7 in the morning to farmers and construction workers. In the afternoon, it sells butter-crusted quiches, piled with precut nubs of ham, to lunchtime tourists, drawn by glossy photos in magazines like Bon Appétit.

Recently, Melvin Webster, who is studying construction skills through YouthBuild while working on his G.E.D., drank coffee and talked. Across the counter, Sam Heartsill, a mother of two whose work at PieLab is ﬁnanced in part by a federally subsidized employment program, drained a bottle of lemon-juice concentrate into homemade custard. At PieLab, both the food and the focus are still works in progress. Dorr leads the progress. As executive director of HERO, she has helped dozens of Hale County families move from busted trailers to tidy bungalows. Now, in her work with PieLab, she has proposed courses for young cooks to learn about of local produce and traditional techniques. When Dorr talks about the PieLab, she typically drops the word “lab” long with the baggage associated with it. As in, “Let’s go down to Pie and get a slice.” “It began as cool place to drink coffee and eat pie,” she said between bites of a blueberryand-cream-cheese pastry cup. “Now it has the chance to be more than that. It may not be as cool, of a place as it used to be but it’s still a place that is buzzing with life.

52 Two of your favorite snacks come together beautifully in these Sweet & Salty Potato Chip Cookies. Be warned, thoughâ&#x20AC;Śthis cookie dough is completely addicting. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll need self-control not to eat it all before you bake it!

CHOCOLATE CHIP POTATO CHIP COOKIES TIME 15 minutes MAKES 24 cookies

1 cup unsalted butter,

¾ cup granulated sugar

softened

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups all-purpose ﬂour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

4 cups crushed potato chips, such as Lay’s

1 Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Line 2 baking sheets with parchment.

2 In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream

together the butter, granulated sugar and brown sugar on medium-high speed until light and ﬂuffy, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the vanilla and eggs and beat on medium speed until just combined. Add the ﬂour, baking soda and salt, then mix on low speed until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chips and 2 cups of the crushed potato chips. Put the remaining 2cups crushed potato chips in a shallow bowl.

3 Roll the dough into 2-inch balls, then

roll them in the remaining potato chips so they are completely coated. Place the cookies 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets and bake until golden, 12 to 15 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

COCONUT CAKE WITH ORANGE AND ROSE WATER TIME

1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

1/4 cup orange blossom water

14 hours MAKES 8-10 servings

2 tbsp. rose water

1 cup vegetable oil

2 1/2 cups ﬁne semolina

1 cup desiccated coconut

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. kosher salt

1 (14-oz.) can sweetened

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 large eggs, plus 1 egg

condensed milk

white

1 cup superﬁne sugar

1 Heat the oven to 375°. Lightly grease

and ﬂour a 9-inch springform cake pan and line with parchment paper. In a medium saucepan, combine the sugar with the lemon zest and juice, the orange blossom and rose waters, and 2 cups water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to around mediumlow and cook until the mixture has slightly reduced, about 15 minutes. Remove the syrup from the heat, pour through a ﬁne sieve to remove the zest, and let cool completely.

4 Transfer the cake to a rack, drizzle

half the cooled syrup over the cake, and let stand until the syrup is absorbed, 30 minutes. Pour the remaining syrup over the cake and let cool. Transfer the cake to the refrigerator and chill for at least 8 hours.

5 Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk

the egg white until frothy. Using a pastry brush, lightly coat the rose petals in egg white and immediately dredge in superﬁne sugar until well coated. Transfer the rose petals to a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and let dry at room temperature for at least 4 hours.

6 When ready to serve, unmold the cake, transfer to a cake stand or plate, and arrange the rose petals over the top in concentric circles. In a small skillet, heat the remaining 5 tablespoons coconut over medium and cook, tossing, until lightly browned and fragrant, about 3 minutes. Transfer the coconut to a bowl and let cool. Sprinkle the toasted coconut over the rose petals and cake before serving.

Petals from 2 organic pink roses

2 In a medium bowl, whisk semolina and 3⁄4 cup coconut, the baking powder, and salt until evenly combined. In a large bowl, whisk the sweetened condensed milk with the 1 cup oil, the vanilla, and 2 eggs until smooth. Add the dry ingredients and stir to combine.

3 Scrape the batter into the prepared

pan and bake until the cake is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 30 minutes.

This cake, arguably the most well-known in North Africa and the Middle East, has countless variations. The semolina cake baked with dried coconut and sweetened condensed milk and then soaked in a fragrant lemony syrup with orange blossom and rose waters added after baking. The candied rose petal garnish is optional (you can simply sprinkle the toasted coconut over the cake), but if you make it, be sure to ask your ďŹ&#x201A;orist for organic roses, which arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sprayed with chemicals or pesticides.

56 These pancake batter cupcakes are far less sweet than most cupcakes, and the sweet maple frosting makes them a perfect combination. Top with a piece of Maple Brown Sugar Bacon or a little cinnamon sugar. The darkest grade of maple syrup will be the most ďŹ&#x201A;avorful. Maple ďŹ&#x201A;akes are made with pure maple syrup. If you have some, sprinkle some over the frosting.

PANCAKE CUPCAKES TIME 30 minutes

3/4 cup buttermilk

3 cups all-purpose ﬂour

MAKES 24 cupcakes

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup unsalted butter,

1/2 teaspoon salt 2 1/4 cups light brown sugar

softened

4 large eggs

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1 tablespoon maple syrup

5 cups confectioner’s sugar

1 To make the cupcakes: Whisk together

the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Cream the butter and brown sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating with each addition. Add the maple syrup. Add the flour mixture in 3 additions, alternating with the buttermilk. Pour the batter into a lined muffin tin. Bake at 325F for 30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the cupcakes comes out clean. Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely.

2 cups unsalted butter Mini pancakes

2 Make the buttercream: Cream the butter with an electric mixer until pale and ﬂuffy. Add the maple syrup and beat until fully combined. Add the confectioner’s sugar one cup at a time, then beat for 2-3 minutes until ﬂuffy.

3 To assemble, using a star-shaped

piping tip, pipe some buttercream onto each cupcake. Top with 2 or 3 mini pancakes and a square of butter. Drizzle some maple syrup on top and enjoy!

“About Us.” B Sweet Dessert Bar | Dessert Trucks | Coffee | Catering | Los Angeles. Bernhard, Adrienne. “Digitizing the Farmers' Market.” Sierra Club, 19 July 2017, www. sierraclub.org/sierra/digitizing-farmers-market. Brown, Dorothy. “Psychologists Reveal Health Beneﬁts Of Baking For Others.” Health Spirit Body, 23 Oct. 2017. Edge, John T. “The Healing Powers of a Pie Shop.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2010. Fuentes, Paul. “ABOUT ME.” Paul Fuentes, Paul Fuentes. Orso, Anna. “Women's March on Philadelphia: Thousands Protest for the Second Time.” Philly.com, Philly.com, 20 Jan. 2018. Villa, Lauren. “Baking It Forward. These SoCal Bakeries Give Back to Their Local Community.” Locale Magazine, 11 Feb. 2016.